The groundwork for potential future integrated CTS residencies has been in place since last fall when the prerequisite for board-eligibility in general surgery was relaxed. There are not currently any programs that I know that have yet proposed their model for what this would entail, but their will be some pilot programs likely in the next 4-5 years. Vascular surgery is also in some prelim discussions for a similar move. Peds surg is unlikely to ever do this b/c of the similarities with general surgery.
As to whether this is a good thing is an entirely different issue that gets extensively debated. It's hard to abbreviate a lot of the skills & experience/judgement you get from your surgery training. For instance, there have been very mixed results with the integrated plastic surgery experiment to this point, with some programs canceling their programs. If you look @ the history of the fields' development, so many of the major advances in PRS have come from the experiences of preliminary training in general surgery, ENT, OMFS, Neurosurgery, orthopedics, and even urology that plastic surgeons brought to the field. Some of this magical synthesis of experience is lost by assuming you can skip the most important years of training and I think a similar thing would happen to CTS.
