Poster1 - 05: IMPLEMENTING INTRAMURAL LEADERSHIP TRAINING WITHIN GENERAL SURGERY RESIDENCY
William A Burns, MD, Nell Maloney Patel, MD, Susannah Wise, MD, Dylan R Nieman, MD, PhD; Rutgers - Rowbert Wood Johnson Medical School

Introduction:  Leadership is a recognized trait of successful surgeons but few residencies provide explicit leadership training.  Addressing this educational gap, we developed an intramural curriculum to foster the development of our residents as leaders.

Methods: We performed an initial needs assessment using a voluntary survey of general surgery residents at our tertiary academic medical center.  We then developed training sessions focused on areas of perceived need: (a) teamwork among personality types, (b) leadership styles, followership and climate, (c) wellness, and (d) feedback.  The curriculum was split into different sessions with each session focusing on one of the four areas of interest. The sessions were led by a PGY-3 with a background in Naval Aviation who built on the leadership training and experience from the Navy and Residents as Teachers and Leaders course.  Participants completed a leadership-style inventory, learned about leadership styles, followership, and climate, and discussed how these factors impacted their experiences within our hospital.  Participants completed surveys following each session, all responses conforming to a 5-point Likert scale (strongly-disagree to strongly-agree).

Results:  28 residents participated in the needs assessment.  72% lacked any prior leadership training.  61% strongly agreed and 39% agreed that leadership training was important during residency but only 14% felt they had received it previously.  65% strongly agreed and 35% agreed that training on communication styles was important, while only 21% felt they had received it.  21 residents completed the second session. 21 completed the post-session survey.  95% strongly agreed or agreed that the session content was new and useful, and 100% rated their overall satisfaction 5/5.

Conclusion:  Leadership skills training is something surgical residents want and value, but isn’t always explicitly taught. A formalized leadership curriculum may help residents develop skills that will benefit them across their career.  In implementing a new intramural curriculum for general surgery residents, we found that assessing and educating residents on styles of leadership, followership, and climate, was well received.  It is difficult to quantify the effects this training may have on our residents’ teamwork and leadership effectiveness.  We posit that insight informs leadership and can only help.