Preoperative Planning for Your Career

Abstract

Surgical residents face significant demands to obtain the requisite skills and knowledge for their specialty by the time they graduate. Structured, guided, deliberate learning in a manner that is reproducible is crucial for surgical resident success and for ensuring residents will be able to meet the increasing demands of clinical practice. Use of an organized surgical planning tool, such as the PERFECT (Position, Exposure, Reduction, Fixation, Evaluation, Closure, and Therapy) model described in this article, is fundamental and indispensable to not only resident education, but to ones’ future career and to orthopaedic practice more broadly. This tool helps to emphasize important elements of a case, allows for mental rehearsal, serves as a custom educational resource for the resident, provides a framework for focused and intentional communication between the resident and attending surgeon, helps to encourage a critical appraisal of a procedure by all participants, and provides the resident guidance for future practice. Broadly instituting teaching frameworks such as the PERFECT model has demonstrated the potential to improve the standardization and overall learning experience for orthopaedic surgical residents, who continue to be tasked with learning more efficiently in a changing healthcare and education landscape.