Journal of surgical education
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A chief resident service (CRS) provides a unique environment to assess competence throughout all aspects of patient care. The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program and Quality in Training Initiative databases are utilized to assess patient outcomes by individual residents with institutional and national comparisons. We hypothesized that residents on the CRS would have equivalent patient care outcomes to peers not on CRS and to chief residents nationally. ⋯ Patient care outcomes provided by PGY-5 residents on a CRS are comparable to those on non-CRS rotations and to PGY-5 residents nationally.
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In surgery residency programs, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education mandated performance assessment can include assessment in the operating room to demonstrate that necessary quality and autonomy goals are achieved by the conclusion of training. For the past 3 years, our institution has used The Ottawa Surgical Competency Operating Room Evaluation (O-SCORE) instrument to assess and track operative skills. Evaluation is accomplished in near real-time using a secure web-based platform for data management and analytics (Firefly). Simultaneous to access of the platform's case logging function, the O-SCORE instrument is delivered to faculty members for rapid completion, facilitating quality, and timeliness of feedback. We sought to demonstrate the platform's utility in detecting operative performance changes over time in response to focused educational interventions based on stored case log and O-SCORE data. ⋯ The data management platform proved to be an effective tool to track responses to supplemental training that was deemed necessary to close defined skills gaps in laparoscopic surgery. This could be seen both in individual and in aggregated data. We were gratified that at the conclusion of the supplemental training, O-SCORE results for the intervention group were not different than those seen in the non-intervention group.
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Effective provider-patient communication has several benefits; however, few surgical residency programs have communication training and surgical residents have limited time for education. We developed a communication curriculum with limited didactics and emphasis on practice. Our objective was to evaluate whether this time-limited intervention led to changes in surgical resident communication skills. ⋯ The brief modules led to increased self-reported use of communication skills and were effective in improving resident communication in OSCEs. This may be a useful curricular model for both surgical and nonsurgical residency programs with limited availability for curricular time.