Poster5 - 05: USING MORBIDITY AND MORTALITY CONFERENCES TO IMPROVE THE SURGICAL TRAINEE'S ORATORY SKILLS
Karan Grover, MD, PharmD, Milind Kachare, MD, Jessica Crystal, MD, Siavash Saadat, MD, Nell Maloney Patel, MD; Rutgers- Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Background: Public speaking is an essential skill for any leader. Surgeons are increasingly in leadership positions because of their unique training and expertise. Furthermore, maintaining composure and communicating in a logical process is necessary for oral boards. Therefore, it is essential that the surgical trainee is able to lead an audience. Currently, most surgical residencies lack any formal training in public speaking.

Objective: Our goal is to develop the oratory and presentation skills of surgical residents in the setting of morbidity and mortality conferences (MMC).  

Survey: As part of this initiative, we initially created a voluntary survey to evaluate residents’ (N=36) perceptions of the conference with a 55% (N=20) response rate. 85% of respondents ranked public speaking skills as “important” or “highly important” for their future careers and  interested in using MMC as a forum to prepare for oral boards. 50% of respondents were interested in peer to peer, public feedback with an additional 10% open to the idea.

Proposed intervention: Our institution is revamping the feedback system to improve the quality of resident MMC presentations. 1) We require that all presentations follow a predetermined template to maintain internal consistency and organization. 2) We are creating an online rubric to be completed by each resident attendee for each presentation to be dispensed immediately after the conference. 3) We will be piloting a new segment at the conclusion of each MMC for a public critique on the specifics of presenters’ strengths and weaknesses by a co-resident. We envision this process lasting no longer than 1 minute and will be on standard metrics including "engagement of audience", "ability to answer questions succinctly and persuasively", "knowledge of topic", "use of filler words”, etc.

Conclusion: Given the evolving roles of surgeons, oratory skills are crucial for advancement and the reputation of the surgical trainee. Most respondents in our survey recognize MMC as an opportunity to concomitantly prepare for oral boards and improve their public speaking. We are in the process of deploying a public, peer to peer feedback system that will improve the quality of MMC and accelerate our residents’ professional development.