The Program Evaluation Committee in Action: Lessons Learned From a General Surgery Residency's Experience

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the success of the annual program evaluation process and describe the experience of a Program Evaluation Committee for a General Surgery residency program.

Design: We conducted a retrospective review of the Program Evaluation Committee's meeting minutes, data inputs, and outcomes from 2014 to 2016. We identified top priorities by year, characterized supporting data, summarized the improvement plans and outcome measures, and evaluated whether the outcomes were achieved at 1 year.

Setting: Virginia Mason Medical Center General Surgery Residency Program.

Participants: Program Evaluation Committee members including the Program Director, 2 Associate Program Directors, 2 Senior Faculty Members, and 1 Resident.

Results: All outcome measures were achieved or still in progress at 1 year. This included purchasing a GI mentor to improve endoscopic simulation training, establishing an outpatient surgery rotation to increase the volume of cases, and implementing a didactic course on adult learning principles for faculty development to improve intraoperative teaching. Primary reasons for slow progress were lack of follow-through by delegates or communication breakdown.

Conclusions: The annual program evaluation process has been successful in identifying top priorities, developing action plans, and achieving outcome measures using our systematic evaluation process.

Keywords: Practice-Based Learning and Improvement; Professionalism; Program Evaluation in Medical Education; Systems-Based Practice; general surgery; professionalism; surgical education.