Education provision for surgical senior house officers

The provision of formal education in surgical SHO training is a requirement for posts to be accredited by postgraduate deans. We carried out a questio nnaire survey of surgical SHOs attending a Royal College of Surgeons of Eng land study day to quantify the amount of time given to formal education and supervised operating. We found that 79 % of SHOs at district general hospi tals and 87.5 % at teaching hospitals were provided with a formal education programme. Of these SHOs, 77 % were able to attend the teaching on a regul ar basis,ln an average week, 8 % of SHOs received no supervised operating e xperience and 37 % had no operations supervised by a consultant. These resu lts suggest that many hospitals fall short of the accepted guidelines on ba sic surgical training. This issue must be addressed by the Royal Colleges.