A structured step-by-step program to increase scholarly activity.

Objectives: Development and maintenance of scholarly activity is a challenge for small community-based surgical training programs. The current Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Program Requirements in General Surgery states that, "Residents should participate in scholarly activity," and "The sponsoring institution and program should allocate adequate educational resources to facilitate resident involvement in scholarly activities." We adopted a program designed to improve the quality of research projects pursued by surgical residents and to increase the number of projects submitted for both presentation and publication.

Pretraining and posttraining assessment of residents' performance in the fourth accreditation council for graduate medical education competency: patient communication skills.

Hypothesis: Structured communication curricula will improve surgical residents' ability to communicate effectively with patients.

Design And Setting: A prospective study approved by the institutional review board involved 44 University of Connecticut general surgery residents. Residents initially completed a written baseline survey to assess general communication skills awareness.

A comparison of sentinel node biopsy before and after neoadjuvant chemotherapy: timing is important.

Background: Because neoadjuvant chemotherapy is being used more frequently, the optimal timing of sentinel node biopsy (SNB) remains controversial. We previously evaluated the predictive value of SNB before neoadjuvant chemotherapy in clinically node-negative breast cancer. Our identification rate of the sentinel node among 52 patients before chemotherapy with a mean tumor size of 4 cm was 100%.