Early, intermediate, and late effects of a surgical skills "boot camp" on an objective structured assessment of technical skills: a randomized controlled study.

Background: Surgical interns enter residency with variable technical abilities and many feel unprepared to perform necessary procedures. We hypothesized that interns exposed to a preinternship intensive surgical skills curriculum would demonstrate improved competency over unexposed colleagues on a test of surgical skills and that this effect would persist throughout internship.

Study Design: We designed a 3-day intensive skills "boot camp" with simulation-based training on 10 topics.

Culture results via the internet: a novel way for communication after an emergency department visit.

Objective: To determine whether the Internet could be used to facilitate personal delivery of culture results to care givers after patient discharge from the pediatric emergency department.

Study Design: We recruited families of children who had cultures taken and were discharged home from our tertiary pediatric emergency department. Parents were given a unique ID and password to retrieve information on culture results from the study web-site.