Impact of a surgical postgraduate course on undergraduate surgical performance

Postgraduate medical education generally has one of two basic goals: to improve general cognitive knowledge or to impart technical and management skills in a narrower area of medicine. Physicians invest enormous amounts of time and money in acquiring continued medical education, but there are little data on the objective benefits derived from such efforts. Because it is so difficult to make valid assessments of additions to cognitive knowledge gained by practicing surgeons, we studied the responses of a more homogeneous group, third- and fourth-year medical students, to an intensive four-day surgical course. These students were serving a surgical clerkship and were required to attend the course. Junior medical students who attended the course received higher scores on written examinations than their peers who did not participate in the course, but this did not reach statistical significance (P = .02). On objective tests, there was no difference between the scores of the fourth-year medical students. This report emphasizes the inherent difficulty in using objective criteria to measure courses.