Editorial: What Makes Young Surgeons Tick (or Cut)?

Excerpt

In the next couple of months, this year’s class of residents and fellows will graduate. These surgeons go out into the world with many incentives to operate, and very few reasons not to. On the receiving end, practices and hospitals place few if any restrictions on these surgeons, many of whom will operate with no oversight at all after graduation—apart from the diffuse and distant specter of the oral boards process in the United States and analogous quizzes elsewhere. While these examinations likely filter out some of the more-severe outliers in terms of knowledge, skill, and judgment, they have little or no ability to establish or enforce the kinds of normative standards that would make us proud to be surgeons, and they probably are not the right tool for that job, anyway. That responsibility instead should fall to practice groups, senior partners, and (for surgeons who are employed by medical centers), hospitals. …