Session Design Submission Review

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Yes

ACGME requirements mandate the instruction of ethics and professionalism to residents and fellows. Ethics in surgery, however, is different from ethics in other fields of medicine in that a) we must necessarily hurt to cure; b) our patients are asleep, and c) the consequences of our operations are often irreversible. Trust between patient and surgeon, as Carlos Pellegrini had famously written, is thus the cornerstone of our profession. To both earn and maintain the trust of patients, surgeons have a unique duty to have a working understanding of the frameworks and ethical considerations in the context and priorities of our extremely complex healthcare system.

Compelling data shows that non-clinical education is only effective when integrated into clinical training, and nothing is more central to or universal about surgical education than M&M.  Several institutions have experimented with offering ‘Ethics M&Ms’, sessions in lieu of regular conference in order to discuss ethically challenging cases. Not wanting to separate ethics from clinical considerations, however, our team decided to integrate an ethics curriculum into actual M&M cases over the last two years. Based on the SCORE modules, we identified the most frequent and weight-bearing ethical scenarios surgeons are likely to encounter and organized a flexible curriculum around it. Our goal was to include an ethics concept in M&M bimonthly, with the curriculum recurring every two years. The proposed workshop would share our concepts, frameworks, and ways of integration into any M&M structure. Participants would be armed with an organized approach to bolster than own ethics curricula immediately upon return to their institutions.

90-minute workshop

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Yes

Identify a list of the most essential ethics topics for surgeons to understand.

Crete the building blocks for an integrated ethics curriculum for surgical residents.

Recommend ways in which programs can evaluate the success of their ethics curricula.