General surgery residency training issues

Abstract

The practice of general surgery has undergone a marked evolution in the past 20 years, which has been inadequately recognized and minimally addressed. The changes that have occurred have been disruptive to residency training, and to date there has been inadequate compensation for these. Evidence is now emerging of significant issues in the overall performance of recent graduates from at least 3 sources: the evaluation of external agents who incorporate these graduates into their practice or group, the opinions of the residents themselves, and the performance of graduates on the oral examination of the American Board of Surgery during the past 8 years. The environmental and technological causes of the present situation represent improvements in care for patients, and are clearly irreversible. Hence, solutions to the problems must be sought in other areas. To address the issues effectively, greater recognition and engagement are needed by the surgical community so that effective solutions can be crafted. These will need to include improvements in the efficiency of teaching, with the assumption of greater individual resident responsibility for their knowledge, the establishment of more defined standards for knowledge and skills acquisition by level of residency training, with flexible self-assessment available online, greater focus of the curriculum on current rather than historical practice, increased use of structured assessments (including those in a simulated environment), and modifications to the overall structure of the traditional 5-year residency.