Dimitrios Stefanidis
Professor of Surgery and Vice Chair of Education, Chief, MIS and Bariatric SurgerySurgery
ude[dot]ui[at]afetsmid
Developing a competency-based education curriculum for surgery residents
Our traditional training paradigm in surgery leads to surgeons with variable skill that negatively affects patient outcomes. Competency-based education (CBE) is known to decrease performance variability and promote uniform skill acquisition. Recognizing this important issue, we embarked 3 years ago in the development of a competency-based training paradigm for our surgery residency program. To accomplish this we have incorporated best existing evidence for optimal skill acquisition in a pilot rotation-based training module focused on laparoscopic cholecystectomy and have obtained initial evidence of effectiveness (results included in the attached paper that has been submitted for publication and is currently under review). The promising initial results of our efforts have led to the development of 3 additional CBE modules more recently that have been incorporated in other cross disciplinary areas of surgical training (breast surgery, endocrine surgery, microsurgery in plastic surgery) . Our goal is to incorporate CBE in all aspects of our surgery residency and transform our current training paradigm paradigm to optimize skill acquisition of our trainees and minimize skill variability of our graduating chief residents. If successful, many other training programs in and outside surgery can benefit by incorporating the approach we are developing and lessons learned from our experience. This has the potential to lead to improved physician training and performance and benefit patient safety and outcomes.