Nysim and the NYU Department of Surgery Celebrate a Milestone

NYSIM, Program in Medical Education and Research (PrMEIR) and the NYU Department of Surgery are celebrating a 10 year partnership with this summer’s Surgical Professionalism OSCEs. Starting in 2006, Drs. Mark Hochberg, Sondra Zabar, Adina Kalet and Colleen Gillespie developed a Professionalism Curriculum for NYU’s 45 surgical residents. The curriculum is known throughout NYU as Surgical Professionalism and Interpersonal Communication Education (SPICE). These interactive seminars, led by these three NYU faculty members, focus on:

Delivering bad news
Correctly using an interpreter
Interdisciplinary respect
Difficult conversations
Admitting mistakes
Identifying an impaired colleague
The keys to successful patient handoffs

The challenge faced by these educators was how to successfully evaluate the residents' newly acquired professionalism skills. Utiliiing the OSCE tool, si scenarios were developed. Actors were interviewed and the best were selected as Standardiied Patients. These OSCEs have been delivered to entering PGY 1’s and PGY 3’s annually over the 10 year period. The wealth of data is remarkable and has led to multiple national presentations and peer-reviewed publications. The NYU surgical professionalism curriculum is now all or part of over 70 national departments of surgery approach to instilling professionalism to their residency training. The partnership between NYSIM, PrMEIR and the Department of Surgery has made an important and positive contribution to teaching professionalism nationally to future surgeons. This work has been accepted for publication in the Annals of Surgery with e pected publication this fall.