ASE 2025 Workshops

Overview: We spend a tremendous amount of effort addressing learners who need remediation in ACGME competencies, but we rarely focus on how to remediate faculty who are not realizing their full potential. Many examples of challenging faculty scenarios exists: the yelling/screaming/ abusive attending, the disengaged attending, the attending who doesn’t let residents do any part of the operation, the attending who never turns in evaluations/EPAs – the list goes on. In this scenario-based workshop, groups will formulate practical approaches to challenging faculty situations with implementation strategies. Focus will be on tangible, take away plans. Workshop faculty are experienced in navigating challenging, underperforming faculty scenarios.

Session Objectives:
1. Formulate strategies to facilitate faculty performance improvement in education
2. Construct implementation strategies for faculty performance in education
3. Apply continuous quality improvement principles in faculty improvement

Overview: Are you looking to advance your research skills and turn your everyday work into scholarly projects? Join us for a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn practical strategies to convert your ideas into research and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to transform them into publications. Whether you are new to research or a seasoned academic, this session offers tools and insights to help you initiate, develop, and refine research projects while effectively using AI. Don’t miss this chance to learn from experts, connect with peers, and elevate your research to the next level!
Target Audience: This interactive hands-on workshop is designed for surgical educators, surgeons, researchers, trainees, and other healthcare professionals who are keen to explore innovative approaches in research and want to transform their ideas into high-impact scholarly projects.

Information for Participants:
This workshop will incorporate a mix of informational sessions and hands-on activities to provide a comprehensive and immersive learning experience. Prior to the workshop, all the participants
will be notified about what tools will be demonstrated and how to download them. Each participant will bring their laptop for the workshop and download tools per prior instructions.

Objectives:
By the end of this workshop, participants will leave with a comprehensive toolkit for advancing their education research endeavors.
They will learn how to:

• Apply best practices for the ethical use of AI in research to maintain academic integrity and rigor.

• Identify and develop compelling research ideas from their everyday work that are relevant to their field.

• Communicate and refine research questions effectively through collaborative feedback and peer engagement.

• Utilize AI tools to streamline the research process, from identifying literature gaps to conducting efficient literature reviews.

• Implement AI-driven strategies to enhance the quality and impact of their research, ensuring their work aligns with the latest advancements in the field.

Overview: Health inequities have long been part of the healthcare system, but recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have brought them to the forefront. To address racial and ethnic disparities in surgical care, diversifying the surgical workforce is essential. However, given the lengthy surgical pipeline, cross-cultural training is also necessary.
The ACGME mandates health equity education and effective communication for residents with diverse cultural backgrounds, yet a standardized cultural competency curriculum is lacking. Cultural dexterity provides a fresh approach, focusing on the skills needed for high-quality, patient-centered care rather than just understanding cultural influences.
The Provider Awareness and Cultural dexterity Toolkit for Surgeons (PACTS) trial, conducted in eight academic surgical residency programs from 2019-2022, aimed to enhance residents’ skills in caring for diverse patients. The PACTS curriculum helps residents recognize biases and equips them with tools in four key areas: 1) Building Trust and Effective Cross-Cultural Communication; 2) Optimizing Communication with Limited English Proficiency; 3) Informed Consent in Cross-Cultural Relationships; and 4) Pain Management in Diverse Surgical Care.
Results showed significant improvements in residents’ knowledge and skills in cross-cultural encounters, positively impacting patient experiences. This workshop will train faculty and residents on implementing the PACTS curriculum, guiding attendees through its components and case explorations while emphasizing adaptations for their specific surgical training programs.

Session Objectives:
1. Demonstrate understanding of the concept of cultural dexterity and its application to surgical care and caring for cross-cultural patients.
2. Articulate understanding of the PACTS curriculum components.
3. Apply best practices for implementation of the PACTS curriculum at surgical residency training programs

Overview: The growth of simulation-based education has led to an increased demand for surgical simulation educators. Junior faculty are frequently tasked with spearheading simulation training without experience in simulation, training in simulation theory, or knowledge of educational methodologies. This workshop offers valuable guidance for running a surgical simulation program, regardless of resources and experience. Experienced professionals in the field will share ideas and tools for developing or renovating simulation curricula.

Session Objectives:
1. Formulate a human, financial, and material needs framework for a surgical simulation program
2. Diagram department, institution, and industry financial support for simulation.
3. Understand the fundamental principles of simulation education and how to apply them.
4. Acquire a broad base of tools, resources, and validated simulations to build or improve a surgical simulation program.

Overview: From evidence of gender and racial bias within faculty letters of recommendation to the race-based differences present in examination scores such as the USMLE Step 1 and 2, bias is pervasive within medical student and resident recruitment. Implicit biases such as these stem from unconscious or involuntary judgments one makes toward a person based on an internalized stereotype, often coming from a lived experience. These biases are highly prevalent within medical education, such as is demonstrated in studies showing that staff surgeons prefer men in fields such as surgery and women in fields such as family medicine, and lead to discrimination toward trainees who are under-represented in medicine.
Implicit bias can be most impactful when making high stakes decisions, such as during resident and medical student recruitment. Comments such as “they just don’t fit our program” may mask an underlying implicit bias against the “other” or preference for an applicant who has shared characteristics with an interviewer, a phenomenon known as cloning. Further, over-reliance on inherently biased, seemingly objective assessments such as grades and test scores to screen applicants can result in less diversity within a medical school or residency program.
Trainee recruitment in medical education has undergone significant change over the past few decades, as medical schools and residency programs alike shift from a focus on grades and test scores to holistic review. In order to increase recruitment of diverse trainees in UME and GME as these changes occur, we must train our educators in effective strategies for mitigating the impact of implicit bias. Therefore, this workshop (co-sponsored by the DEI, GSE, and Faculty Development Committees) aims to give UME and GME leaders in education the tools they need to conduct effective holistic reviews of applicants while decreasing the implicit bias in selection committee meetings and decisions.

Session Objectives:
1. Describe an effective process for holistic review of applicants to medical school or residency
2. Strategize solutions to common barriers to holistic review
3. Identify methods for mitigating the impact of implicit bias within faculty interviews and selection committee decisions

Overview: A sense of professional identity, or alignment of professional roles, responsibilities, knowledge beliefs, and skills, is an essential component of developing in one’s surgical practice. However, competing priorities and interests in the healthcare field can at times make this alignment challenging. As a higher portion of healthcare in US is delivered by large corporations, a higher proportion of surgical education is offered by surgeons who are not affiliated with an academic center. Such professionals are involved with the education of close to
50% of our trainees and form about 30% of the membership of the Association for Surgical Education. This group often struggle with professional identity and face unique challenges meeting the teaching and scholarly requirements of training programs while balancing ever present productivity concerns. This workshop will focus on professional identity formation and challenges faced by the teaching faculty who are not directly associated with the universities.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
– Appreciate the process of professional identity formation of teaching faculty at independent programs
– Understand challenges uncounted in fulfilling the requirements / teaching obligations as required by training programs
– Consider strategies to better align the roles of teaching faculty without compromising their productivity

Session Objectives:
1. Recognize how professional identity formation may impact teaching faculty at independent programs
2. Identify challenges to identity development as educators and propose potential solutions
3. Develop strategies to better align professional roles

Overview: This workshop aims to introduce surgical educators (residency program and clerkship directors, teaching faculty, educational psychologists, and surgical residents) to the applications of growth mindset in surgical training and equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to implement evidence-based growth mindset interventions for surgical trainees at their home
institutions.

Session Objectives:
1. Compare the different types of mindsets, the behaviors associated with them, and the implications of those mindsets in surgical training.
2. Review an established growth mindset intervention and appraise it for potential implementation at their own institutions.
3. Anticipate challenges their learners may face in adopting growth mindsets during surgical training.

Overview: Surgeons regularly face the difficult ethical challenge of supporting patients and families through high-stakes decisions as they consider burdensome treatments, e.g., major surgery and life-supporting treatments, in settings of serious illness and near the end of life. Our novel curriculum, called the Fundamentals of Communication in Surgery (FCS), aims to prepare all future surgeons to navigate these difficult treatment decisions with patients and their families. We are piloting the FCS curriculum at 5 institutions this academic year. For this workshop, we seek to bring a section of this curriculum to the broader audience of surgical education week.
Attendees will be able to practice and return to their institution to disseminate techniques of
1. Attending to emotion-Displaying empathy, avoiding the cognitive trap
2. Supporting patients in deliberation: Presenting the context, goals and downsides of surgery
This workshop is ideal for practicing surgeons, surgical trainees, surgical educators and anyone who interacts with patients.

Session Objectives:
1. Learners will be able to ‘avoid the cognitive trap’ by recognizing and responding to the emotions behind patients’ questions and comments.
2. Learners will be able to recognize that surgery can only accomplish four goals: help patients live longer, feel better, prevent a disability, or make a diagnosis.
3. Learners will be able to elicit patient goals for surgery and understand how a deliberative space around goals can drive a conversation around consent for surgery.