Resident involvement in postoperative conversations: an underused opportunity

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Surgical Communication
• Patient-Family Interaction

Background:

• Residents often miss postoperative family conversations due to time constraints and established attending relationships.
• Postoperative communication is a key opportunity for residents to develop interpersonal and communication skills.
• Resident participation in these crucial conversations is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess surgical resident and attending surgeon attitudes towards resident involvement in postoperative family conversations.
• To evaluate resident experience and comfort levels in these interactions.
• To identify barriers and opportunities for enhancing resident communication skills.

Main Methods:

• Anonymous paper surveys administered to residents and attending surgeons at an academic surgery center.
• Survey data collected on attitudes, experience, and comfort regarding resident participation.
• Nonparametric statistics used for response comparison.

Main Results:

• Residents find postoperative conversations very important and feel comfortable, yet average fewer than 10 experiences annually.
• Attendings rate resident performance lower than self-assessments and express lower comfort levels (P < 0.001).
• Resident participation is limited (68%), especially when delivering bad news (27%), despite 86% of attendings believing more opportunities are needed.

Conclusions:

• Residents possess comfort but lack sufficient opportunities for postoperative family communication.
• A significant discrepancy exists between resident self-perception and attending evaluations of communication skills.
• Targeted communication skills workshops focusing on postoperative conversations could be beneficial for resident training.