Normalized Competitive Index: Analyzing Trends in Surgical Fellowship Training Over the Past Decade (2009-2018)

There is a lack of literature describing how competitive surgical fellowships are, especially across specialties. Such information would be valuable to prospective candidates, especially as immediate postresidency subspecialty training becomes the norm for general surgery. Match-rates alone may be misleading indicators as programs may not fill positions with unqualified applicants. We propose a simple metric to analyze the competitiveness of various surgical subspecialties to each other and themselves over time.

Retrospective cohort study. The Competitive Index is defined as the percentage of filled programs within each specialty divided by the match-rate for that specialty. For ease of comparison, a Normalized Competitive Index (NCI) was developed, normalizing the metric for all specialties in that year to a value of 1.

The National Resident Matching Program, The Fellowship Council, and the San Francisco Match publicly available match data from 2009 to 2018.

General Surgery Associated Fellowship Applicants (Abdominal Transplant, Colorectal, Surgical Oncology, Minimally Invasive Surgery, Pediatric, Plastic, Critical Care, Thoracic, and Vascular).

The overall match rate for all specialties was 74.6% and 84.0% of all programs were filled. Over the past decade, pediatric surgery was significantly more competitive than other specialties (NCI 1.67, p < 0.0001), while surgical critical care (NCI 0.58, p < 0.0001) and vascular (NCI 0.90, p < 0.0492) were significantly less competitive. When comparing the NCI within each specialty from the first 5 years (2009-2013) to the last 5 years, (2014-2018), surgical critical care (NCI 0.54 vs. 0.62, p = 0.0462) and thoracic (NCI 0.74 vs. 1.08, p=0.0025) became significantly more competitive, while transplant (NCI 1.10 vs. 0.92, p = 0.0343) and colorectal (NCI 1.32 vs. 1.09, p = 0.0021) became significantly less competitive.

The NCI is a metric which might be useful to prospective applicants and which could be provided annually by organizations sponsoring fellowship matching processes. Further research must be performed to establish what defines a qualified applicant in each specialty.