Abstracts from the Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association for Surgical Education

Abstract

Thirty-two of 90 submitted abstracts were selected for presentation at the 28th annual meeting of the Association for Surgical Education, held together with the Association of Program Directors in Surgery and the Association for Residency Coordinators in Surgery. The 2008 annual meeting was held in Toronto, Canada.

Based on common themes, nine abstracts were chosen for publication under the auspices of the Alliance for Clinical Education. These abstracts have been modified to be brief, self-contained works, understandable to those who have not attended the meeting or are from non-surgical disciplines.

One group of three abstracts explores methods for integrating procedural skills with communication skills to better simulate clinical scenarios. The first of these abstracts validates this method while the following two abstracts use this method with trained simulated patients and virtual patients.

Faculty evaluation is the focus of another set of abstracts. The effect of the time of year and type of service on medical student evaluation is studied in Plymale et al.'s abstract. Pulito et al. investigated the impact of changing to an evaluation form that included behaviors actually witnessed rather than behaviors just thought to be desirable. They found the specific behaviors form to be more precise and reliable.

The next group of abstracts examines medical student education. Balkissoon et al. compared medical students' with faculty and residents' accuracy of digital rectal exam utilizing a task trainer with electronic pressure sensors. The following two abstracts address the moral distress encountered by medical students during the surgical clerkship and introduction of flex-time into the surgical curriculum to allow students to explore areas of personal interest within surgery.

The work by Jensen et al., challenges the general belief that the use of faculty experts in a basic surgical skills laboratory enhances learning, by analyzed the effect of a faculty expert on basic surgical skill acquisition by measuring transfer of learning to more complex tasks.

The abstracts presented in this manuscript represent a sample of the work being done internationally to improve the quality of surgical education for both medical students and surgical residents.

Notes

∗p < .05 (students vs. faculty)

† p < .05 (students vs. residents)