Milestones in Plastic Surgery: Attending Assessment versus Resident Assessment

The Plastic Surgery Milestones Project was jointly conceived by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the American Board of Plastic Surgery as a tool to improve granularity in resident feedback. Resident self-evaluations were compared to attending clinical competency committee evaluations to gauge resident self-perceptions and understanding of the milestones framework.

Semiannual evaluations from June of 2014 to 2017 were analyzed and compared with corresponding resident self-evaluations from the 2015 to 2017 academic year at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Evaluations were analyzed for overall trends in performance. The presence of systemic differences between each type of evaluation were determined using Student's t tests. Subgroup analysis using the chi-square test was performed to determine factors that may contribute to major assessment disparity (≥1).

Six thousand two hundred seven milestones across 187 faculty evaluations and 3139 milestones across 106 resident self-evaluations were available for review. With the exception of postgraduate year-2 residents, residents rated themselves at a significantly lower level in the competencies of medical education and patient care. Postgraduate year, academic year timing, and Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education competency were associated with major assessment discrepancies.

Overall, resident and faculty evaluations at the authors' program were concordant, which demonstrates that residents are capable of accurately assessing their own abilities and understanding the milestones framework. Areas of discordance between resident and faculty evaluations fostered discussion between residents and faculty and have led to multiple changes in the authors' program. The introduction of self-evaluation tools at other programs may provide them with similar benefits.