Immediate Surgical Skills Feedback in the Operating Room Using "SurF" Cards

Ensuring residents develop operative skills requires application of the principles of guided learning, deliberate practice, and directed feedback.

We sought to create and implement a tool to promote procedural "key" step review and immediate feedback on surgical skills, and examined faculty and resident satisfaction with surgical skills feedback.

We created surgical skills feedback (SurF) cards for 8 gynecologic procedures. Faculty/fellows and residents completed prestudy surveys querying frequency of preoperative key step review and satisfaction with surgical skill feedback, a SurF card each time 1 of 8 procedures was performed, and poststudy surveys to evaluate for changes.

Prestudy surveys were completed by 31 faculty/fellows and 20 residents, with 55% (17 of 31) of the faculty/fellows and 5% (1 of 20) of the residents reporting key step review before surgery. All reported low satisfaction rates with feedback frequency, quality, and timeliness. After implementation of SurF cards, preoperative key step review occurred in 78% (82 of 105) of the procedures. Twenty-one faculty/fellows (68%) and 16 residents (80%) completed our poststudy survey. Faculty/fellows reported statistically similar key step review (n  =  15 [71%], P  =  .23), while residents reported that key step review had significantly improved (n  =  6 [38%], P  =  .01). Resident satisfaction with feedback frequency (5% to 50%, P  =  .002) and quality (15% to 50%, P  =  .02) increased significantly.

The SurF cards we developed facilitated procedural key step review, were associated with significantly improved resident satisfaction with surgical feedback, and could prove helpful with outcomes assessments, such as Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-required documentation of Milestone attainment.