APDS Panel Session IV: Intersection of Surgical Outcomes and Medical Education

Abstract

The American people have become acutely aware of disparate outcomes following surgical interventions. Public reporting of outcomes data and its use in performance improvement and quality control is commonplace. This panel was developed to initiate a discussion regarding the use of patient centered outcomes data in surgical education. To focus the broad topic of integrating outcomes data into surgical education, questions were presented to each speaker before the conference (Table 1). The term outcomes data can be broadly applied. Within the field of surgical education, it is often used to refer to educational outcomes like board examination scores or time to complete a task in the simulation suite. This type of data is already used within the field of surgical education to help program directors and trainees benchmark their progress through the stages of training until they enter the world of surgical practice. While these results are immensely important as markers of resident progression and programmatic success, they are learner-centered proxies, and do not measure the residents’ ability to care for surgical patients or the programs’ ability to train surgeons. Patient centered outcomes data exist for a variety of domains in surgical care. We can measure patient satisfaction, surgical complications and to a lesser extent surgical costs. Despite the ability to generate these data, we seldom use it to direct surgical education to meet the needs of our patients or to assess how successful we, as surgical educators, are in fulfilling our mission to train surgeons. Surgical residents need to understand outcomes data and learn to use data to effect quality improvement. Surgical trainees need to be taught how to deliver patient centered care that capitalizes on their excellence as skilled surgeons, the importance of teamwork and the complexities of the system in which they work. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical