Evaluating a novel surgical risk assessment curriculum for medical students

Predicting surgical risk is challenging. There is no curriculum to teach risk assessment to students. We hypothesize that a risk assessment curriculum will improve medical students' confidence in and familiarity with assessing risk, and help identify barriers to assessing risk.

Third year surgery clerkship students participated in a risk-assessment workshop. Students completed pre- and post-intervention surveys assessing their familiarity with models, and confidence in predicting postoperative complications. Additionally, they completed a retention survey 12-weeks following the session.

Following the session, confidence in predicting post-operative morbidity and mortality improved from <1% to 21.9% and 19.05% respectively. The majority of students continued to feel more confident mortality 12-weeks following the session. Not seeing attendings/residents use the calculator was a significant barrier to use.

This novel risk assessment curriculum improved student confidence towards assessing risk up to three months following the session. Additionally, this study highlights that barriers exist to using risk assessment tools clinically.