Objectives: This trial examines the impact of the Provider Awareness and Cultural dexterity Toolkit for Surgeons (PACTS) curriculum on surgical residents' knowledge, cross-cultural care, skills, and beliefs.
Background: Cross-cultural training of providers may reduce health care outcome disparities, but its effectiveness in surgical trainees is unknown.
Methods: PACTS focuses on developing skills needed for building trust, working with patients with limited English proficiency, optimizing informed consent, and managing pain.
Competency-based medical education (CBME) is the future of medical education and relies heavily on high quality assessment. However, the current assessment practices employed by many general surgery graduate medical education training programs are subpar. Assessments often lack reliability and validity evidence, have low faculty engagement, and differ from program to program.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Provider Awareness and Cultural dexterity Toolkit for Surgeons (PACTS) curriculum was developed to improve surgical resident cultural dexterity, with the goal of promoting health equity by developing cognitive skills to adapt to individual patients' needs to ensure personal, patient-centered surgical care through structured educational interventions for surgical residents. Funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH)'s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, PACTS addresses surgical disparities in patient care by incorporating varied educational interventions, with investigation of both traditional and nontraditional educational outcomes such as patient-reported and clinical outcomes, across multiple hospitals and regions. The unique attributes of this multicenter, multiphased research trial will not only impact future surgical education research, but hopefully improve how surgeons learn nontechnical skills that modernize surgical culture and surgical care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNarrative medicine is a humanities-based discipline that posits that attention to the patient narrative and the collaborative formation of a narrative between the patient and provider is essential for the provision of health care. In this Special Article, we review the basic theoretical constructs of the narrative medicine discipline and apply them to the perioperative setting. We frame our discussion around the 4 primary goals of the current iteration of the perioperative surgical home: enhancing patient-centered care, embracing shared decision making, optimizing health literacy, and avoiding futile surgery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Transitioning from trainee to attending surgeon requires learners to become educators. The purpose of this study is to evaluate educational strategies utilized by surgeons, define gaps in preparation for operative teaching, and identify opportunities to support this transition.
Methods: A web-based, Association of Surgical Education approved survey was distributed to attending surgeons.
Objective: Perioperative communication is critical for procedural learning. In order to develop a periprocedural faculty development tool, we aimed to characterize the current status of preoperative communication in US General Surgery residency programs.
Design: After Association of Program Directors in Surgery approval, a survey was distributed to general surgery programs.
Introduction: Arterial cannulation is frequently performed on intensive care unit (ICU) and operating room patients; a 1% complication rate has been reported. Investigators applied simulation to study clinical providers' arterial catheter (AC) insertion performance and to assess for interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary variation that may contribute to complications.
Methods: Anesthesia, medical critical care, and surgical critical care providers with AC insertion experience were enrolled at 2 academic hospitals.