29 The Surgical Trainee Personality: Selected or Shaped?

Abstract

Abstract Aim This study aims to describe the personality differences between trainees at different stages prior to and during surgical training. Method The Mental Muscle Diagram Indicator was distributed electronically to doctors in training in South West London. A total of 553 trainees completed the personality questionnaire. Specifically, there were general surgery specialty (n = 53), core surgical (n = 254), and foundation trainees (n = 246). 52% of trainees were female. Results Women scored significantly higher in the Extraversion, Sensing and Judging personality domains (p < 0.0001), there were no significant differences between genders for ‘Thinking’. One-way ANOVA only showed a significant difference in the ‘Judging’ domain between grades. Tukey's test was performed showing the difference arose from FT to CST (p = 0.008). Two-way ANOVA showed an interaction between gender and grade for ‘Judging’ and as such simple main effects were performed, with alpha = 0.017 to control for type 1 errors. Significant differences were found in the Judging domain between genders during in FT (p=0.002) and CST (p=0.002), and there was no significant difference for SpRs (p=0.15). Conclusions This study demonstrated differences in personality types between trainee stages and gender. These differences appear to decrease as trainees progress through their training, although the cause of this is unclear.