PS1-10: SURGEONS UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF SURGICAL TOPICS FOR NON-SURGEONS: RESULTS OF A NATIONAL SURVEY
Luke V Selby, MD, MS, Julia R Coleman, MD, MPH, Teresa Jones, MD, Mark Nehler, MD, Paul Montero, MD; University of Colorado

Introduction: The vast majority of medical students do not pursue a career in general surgery, yet traditionally the education on required surgery clinical clerkship is focused on the future general surgeon, not our future consultant.  In order to understand differences in educational requirements, we surveyed surgeons and non-surgeons on the relative importance of a number of topics for the daily practice of non-surgeons.

Methods: Following IRB approval, we circulated an anonymous survey using program listservs, professional connections, and social media, asking respondents to rank the relative importance of 36 topics to the daily practice of non-surgeons on a five-point Likert scale (not at all important to absolutely important).  Topics queried were drawn from our clerkship curriculum as well as conversations with non-surgeons and included both acute and non-acute diseases.  Results were compared between surgeons and non-surgeons, and within different non-surgical careers, with a chi-square test.

Results: Of the 243 respondents, the average age was 32 years, 58% (140) were female, and 74% (180) were non-surgeons.  Areas of non-surgical practice were emergency medicine (EM) (n = 98, 40%), primary care (PC, n = 32, 13%; 13 internal medicine, 7 family medicine, 12 pediatrics), and other specialties such as neurology, pathology or psychiatry (n = 50, 21%). Significant differences existed between EM and PC, with EM physicians ranking acute problems (including abdominal pain, fractures, bowel obstruction, NSTI, trauma) and technical skills (suturing, wound care) of higher importance than PC, and PC ranking breast disease (p=0.04), colorectal cancer (p<0.01) and thyroid/parathyroid disease (p<0.01) of higher importance than EM.  Both EM and IM ranked these topics of higher importance to the practice of a non-surgeon than surgeons did (p < 0.05 for all) except for peritonitis, colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, morbid obesity and thyroid/parathyroid, which they ranked importance similarly.

Conclusion: General surgeons underestimate the importance of surgical topics to the daily practice of non-surgeons.  These results can aid redesign of the general surgery clerkship to improve education of our non-surgical colleagues and help guide personalized educational plans based on medical students’ future non-surgical specialty interest.