Education and Residency: Teaching Conferences
A wide variety of didactic lectures and surgical teaching conferences are available on our extended campuses in all major surgical specialties. Conferences are attended by faculty, residents, and both junior and senior medical students from the Indiana University School of Medicine. Numerous visiting professors are scheduled on campus throughout the year and serve as an important external teaching resource. A number of surgical symposia are sponsored by the department on an annual or alternate year basis in Pediatric Surgery, Plastic Surgery, Trauma and Surgical Critical Care, Cardiovascular Surgery, Thoracic Oncology, Breast Diseases and Gastrointestinal Oncology.
In addition, the Department of Surgery at the IU School of Medicine and the Indiana State Chapter of the American College of Surgeons co-sponsor quarterly educational meetings during which a distinguished Visiting Professor is invited to lecture. Since the Department of Surgery is the only ACGME-RRC approved training program in the state of Indiana, these meetings permit the residents access to the practitioners in the state.
At the beginning of each academic year, new residents in surgery take the Advanced Trauma Life Support Course (ATLS) and the Acute Cardiac Life Support Course (ACLS) as an introduction to emergency room and trauma care. A set of core surgical curriculum lectures are also scheduled weekly during July and August for PGY-1 level trainees to aid in their orientation to the house staff function. Starting in the summer of 2005, the PGY 4 residents are taking the Advanced Trauma Operative Management (ATOM) course to teach and assess competence.
During the past few years, a number of mini-courses have been offered to the resident staff including: a post-graduate seminar to teach residents how to teach, conflict management, minimally invasive surgical techniques (basic and advanced laparoscopy), computer science and medical statistics.
Conferences for our Housestaff
| Breast conference | Peds Surgery Clinical Problems | |
| Center for Surgical Technology | Peds Surgery - M & M | |
| Chairman’s Conference | Peds Surgery - Topics | |
| Education Hour | Plastic Surgery - Indications | |
| GI Conference | Research Forum | |
| Grand Rounds | Selected Readings | |
| Methodist Director’s Conference | Thoracic Topics | |
| Methodist and General Surgery M & M | VA General Surgery Conference | |
| Methodist Trauma/ER Conference | VA Tumor Conference | |
| Pancreas/ERCP Conference | Vascular Conference | |
| Peds Surgery – Neonatal Conference | Wishard Trauma Journal Club | |
| Peds Surgery - Basics | Wishard Trauma M & M |
Attendance at the General Surgery Morbidity-Mortality Conference, Surgery Grand Rounds, Education Hour and the Center for Surgical Technology are mandatory. Unless directly involved with an emergency at the time, residents are free from clinical duties to attend these conferences. Attendance is taken at each of these meetings and residents are expected to attend at least 80% of these meetings. A Basic Science web based program has been developed and ongoing participation is monitored.
Laura Torbeck Ph.D. joined our faculty in 2004 and with her background in medical education, has added a wonderful dimension to our program. Under her leadership, competency teaching, and assessment is well underway. Dr. Torbeck is leading school wide faculty development initiatives to improve teaching on our campus.
