The Resident Portal

As part of the curriculum effort, SCORE has committed to the development of a website to provide educational content aligned with the Patient Care Curriculum Outline to all general surgery residents. The website will be a "one-stop" portal to high-quality educational materials and will facilitate resident self-study as well as teaching at the program level. It will be organized according to the patient care outline, with 28 organ system-based categories further separated into diseases/conditions and operations/procedures.

Modules will be developed for all of the 700 patient care topics in the outline (diseases, conditions, operations, procedures), each consisting of:

Educational objectives

Materials:

Selected readings (e.g., chapters, articles, practice guidelines, procedure
     outlines)

Photos, radiologic images and narrated videos

Assessment (open-ended questions)

The website will also feature robust search tools, links to other websites and resources, and a "My SCORE" section for self-study management (i.e., tracking completion of modules, responses to self-assessment questions, notes, etc.). Residents will also be able to take periodic self-assessment exams using multiple-choice questions from the American Board of Surgery and compare their performance to national averages and norms.

All of the materials are being selected from existing sources and will include content from major surgical texts, such as ACS Surgery: Principles & Practice, Greenfield's Surgery: Scientific Principles & Practice, Schwartz's Principles of Surgery, and Fischer's Mastery of Surgery. In addition to medical publishers, materials are being supplied by specialty surgical societies and related groups. All materials will be vetted and selected by committees of the ABS and APDS.

By consolidating educational resources into one national website, SCORE aims to reduce variability in general surgery residency curricula and provide residents with a structured program for self-directed learning at all stages of training. Residents will be able to access the web-based content at home or at the hospital, for in-depth study or "just-in-time" learning.

Residents will be able to use the website to:

prepare for cases

prepare for weekly conferences and other events

learn about patient care topics that are not heavily emphasized in their current
      curriculum (due to lack of faculty expertise, cases, patient populations)

build their own self-study/learning plan

study for the ABSITE and their board exams

Programs will be able to:

assign residents modules in preparation for weekly conferences or other events

incorporate videos and radiologic images from the website into presentations
      and face-to-face teaching

use the open-ended assessment questions as the basis for discussion in large
      or small group teaching sessions

create rotation-based curricula incorporating SCORE web resources

The website/resident portal will be piloted by a group of general surgery residency programs during the fall of 2008 (see Website Beta-Test), with full release planned for July 2009.

The Surgical Council on Resident Education (SCORE) is a voluntary consortium of the following organizations involved in U.S. surgical education: