Integrating educational objectives and the evaluation process in a general surgery residency program

Although the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires that all of its approved residency programs have written goals and objectives and an evaluation process, many programs have difficulty achieving these goals. For eight years, the general surgery residency program at Abington Memorial Hospital has used a system that integrates each rotation's cognitive, clinical, and procedural objectives into the faculty's evaluation of residents and residents' evaluation of the rotation. The integration of goals and objectives with the post-rotation evaluations provides the program with an ongoing and continual assessment of each resident's progress, the effectiveness of the faculty as teachers, and the educational value of each rotation. In this essay, the authors describe this integrated system and provide examples of one rotation's goals and objectives and the evaluation forms used by faculty and residents.