PREREQUISITE OBJECTIVES FOR GRADUATE SURGICAL EDUCATION - A STUDY OF THE GRADUATE MEDICAL-EDUCATION-COMMITTEE AMERICAN-COLLEGE-OF-SURGEONS

Background: Recent changes in the educational environment and in the c ontent of specialty surgical education have highlighted limitations, b oth educational and logistic, of the current system of graduate surgic al education. To address these issues, the Graduate Medical Education Committee of the American College of Surgeons conducted a study of the educational competencies desired of graduating medical students, and of surgical residents completing their first postgraduate year (PGY 1) . Study Design: Surgeons representing all surgical specialties identif ied learning needs for graduating students and PGY 1 surgical resident s. Responding to a questionnaire based on these learning needs, surgic al educators assigned a priority of essential, desirable, or supplemen tary to each item. Additional questionnaires, limited to student-level items, were sent to graduating medical students matched to surgical r esidency programs, who assessed their competency. Results: Questionnai res were received from 350 senior surgeons and 83 graduating medical s tudents. General agreement was found among surgeons of all specialties of the essential and desired competencies for medical students enteri ng any surgical residency program. Although there was considerable spe cialty variation in the priority given to individual items, there was also a broad general consensus on many areas of essential or desirable knowledge and skill that all surgical interns should possess before c ontinuing in advanced education in a surgical specialty including gene ral surgery. Conclusions: The evidence that many core proficiencies ar e held in common by all surgical specialties argues strongly for caref ul coordination and cooperation among the various residency programs i n an institution to achieve these objectives in a common learning prog ram. (C) 1998 by the American College of Surgeons.