The residency program has an evaluation program based on the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) six core competencies. Our eventual goal is to move our program toward competency-based education. This will require optimizing and increasing the number of resident evaluation methods. This is the future of modern surgical education.

Each resident has a “scorecard,” which grows and evolves during their training. It includes the results of their standardized tests (OITE), professionalism and communication surveys, global faculty evaluations, and focused faculty review that occurs semi-annually. Increasingly, the scorecard will incorporate real-time evaluations of surgical skill.

The Clinical Competency Committee (CCC) meets twice a year to assess resident milestones and comprehensively evaluate each resident. The program director and associate program director then meets with each resident to provide CCC recommendations and discuss their progress. 

Our residency program is tightly linked with evaluation methods that are being developed by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery (ABOS) in knowledge, skills and behaviors. These will increasingly become national standards and we are all proud to have been at the forefront of assessing these new methods for the ABOS and incorporating them into our evaluation program.

In addition, our department has an ABOS grant to study laboratory-based skills assessment methods in areas of hybrid virtual reality surgical simulation. These efforts have engaged the residents as research subjects and authors of projects on how surgical skills are assessed with a goal of optimizing performance in the operating room. We believe that skills training and assessment of skill in the skills lab are increasingly important parts of resident training, and we will remain at the forefront of developing and utilizing these methods.