Gen surg training requirements

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goadyso

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ABS has several general surgery training requirements:
Training Requirements | American Board of Surgery

What happens if you do not complete some of these by your Chief year? Do you simply extend your time in the program?

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ABS has several general surgery training requirements:
Training Requirements | American Board of Surgery

What happens if you do not complete some of these by your Chief year? Do you simply extend your time in the program?

In general, everyone completes them. If a program routinely had residents not completing them, then the program would lose accreditation. ABS did give a little leeway during Covid.

If for some reason you hadn’t completed most of the requirements, then yes you’d have to extend training. But the ABS has pretty strict requirements for time in training too, and the case requirements are fairly bare bones, so it is not usually an issue to complete them.

When one is interviewing for residency, programs are generally pretty up front about these numbers, showing their chief case logs in most situations. If they do not do this or hedge, I would consider it a red flag.
 
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Lucid is correct. This is essentially a non-issue. In general you actually have to have the ability to have fairly substantially more volume than necessary for your existing resident pool and/or to expand. For example - if you want to expand from 4 to 5 or 4 to 6 residents, your current residents need a case log that generally exceeds 1000-1200/yr (or you can demonstrate that you have the equivalent amount of uncovered cases amongst your teaching faculty or planned teaching faculty expansion).
 
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Having said that, its partly on the program... and it is partly on you.

Put yourself in a position to succeed. Be the resident all the faculty want to operate with, understand the decision making, read broadly, and then be around to do cases. In the same program, you can have one chief resident graduate with a ton of cases and another barely graduate with enough.
 
Thank you everyone for your responses about the case numbers

What about these very specific time requirements:
  • At least 54 months of clinical surgical experience with increasing levels of responsibility over the 5 years, with no fewer than 42 months devoted to the content areas of general surgery.
  • No more than 6 months assigned to non-clinical or non-surgical disciplines during all junior years (PGY 1-3).
  • No more than 12 months allocated to any one surgical specialty other than general surgery during all junior years (PGY 1-3)
I had to transfer programs so I am not sure that I will meet the exact numbers for all of these because programs were structured differently. Will these even be an issue as long as I meet all of my total case numbers for the 5 years?
 
Thank you everyone for your responses about the case numbers

What about these very specific time requirements:
  • At least 54 months of clinical surgical experience with increasing levels of responsibility over the 5 years, with no fewer than 42 months devoted to the content areas of general surgery.
  • No more than 6 months assigned to non-clinical or non-surgical disciplines during all junior years (PGY 1-3).
  • No more than 12 months allocated to any one surgical specialty other than general surgery during all junior years (PGY 1-3)
I had to transfer programs so I am not sure that I will meet the exact numbers for all of these because programs were structured differently. Will these even be an issue as long as I meet all of my total case numbers for the 5 years?

It will be an issue if/when you go to seek board certification. The ACGME requirements for programs reflects the ABS requirements for getting board certification. Graduating from residency and being eligible for board certification are two different but closely related things.

However, I think you will find the rotations which qualify under these different categories sufficiently broad that most don’t have an issue.

If you are coming too close to spending more than 12 months on a given surgical subspecialty that doesn’t count as “general surgery,” then you should discuss that with your program director.
 

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Thank you everyone for your responses about the case numbers

What about these very specific time requirements:
  • At least 54 months of clinical surgical experience with increasing levels of responsibility over the 5 years, with no fewer than 42 months devoted to the content areas of general surgery.
  • No more than 6 months assigned to non-clinical or non-surgical disciplines during all junior years (PGY 1-3).
  • No more than 12 months allocated to any one surgical specialty other than general surgery during all junior years (PGY 1-3)
I had to transfer programs so I am not sure that I will meet the exact numbers for all of these because programs were structured differently. Will these even be an issue as long as I meet all of my total case numbers for the 5 years?
What year did you start when you transferred? While program structures may vary, they should all be meeting the requirements to graduate board-eligible surgeons.

I don't know how much time you have left (I hope you're not a chief just figuring this out), but like Lucid said, you should sit down with your PD and review your schedule if you have any concerns. Every rotation you did by month has to be accounted for in writing and signed off by the PD for submission to the board.

Getting the actual cases shouldn't be a problem, especially in your last two years. Just check your numbers and make sure you aren't missing any areas. At my program, we didn't have a dedicated HPB surgeon and most of that work was done at another hospital we didn't rotate at. So it was always a scramble to make sure we got our pancreas/liver numbers by the end.
 
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