Pre-Intern "Jump Start" Program: a quantitative evaluation
Travis Vowels, MD, Manuel Rojo, MD, Alan Lumsden, MD.
Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA.
OBJECTIVE: We recognized an opportunity to ease the transition from medical student to vascular intern in the integrated vascular surgery program and created a brief, but intense, 3-day program to focus on the knowledge and skills required to succeed. "Jump Start" is a unique program, which has been refined over the past 3 years. In this first of a kind report, we evaluate the efficacy of this program as judged by the trainees immediately after completion.
METHODS: This was a 3-day program which included both a didactic component and a "hands-on" training experience (Table 1), specifically designed to address issues which faculty and residents perceived as challenging. In 2016, a total of 27 of the 56 incoming residents (48% of the entire class) attended Jump Start and 22 (81%) completed the follow-up questionnaire. This multiple choice survey was created using Survey Monkey and distributed by email.
RESULTS: Of the 22 respondents, 100% rated the overall program and the content presented as "very good" or "excellent". Eighty-six percent of respondents felt "comfortable" or "very comfortable" with their knowledge of vascular anatomy and 91% with their ability to perform a vascular history and physical. Only 59%, however, felt similar in their ability to interpret vascular pathology on computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging and only 41%, with performing and interpreting basic vascular ultrasounds. Seventeen of the 22 respondents (77%) felt "very confident" in their ability to be a better surgical assistant while only 36% felt the same in their ability to evaluate a patient with a vascular emergency. The cadaver dissection was ranked as the most important aspect of the entire course by 68%. Overall, 100% of survey respondents agreed this training program was worth their time and would recommend it to incoming integrated vascular surgery interns.
CONCLUSIONS: The Jump Start program is highly valued by the incoming integrated vascular intern class, as evaluations for most of the modules were excellent. This study serves as a quantitative baseline for improving the educational curriculum for incoming integrated vascular surgery interns across the nation.
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