General Surgery Core Clerkship

An illustrative, fictional program — not based on any specific institution's curriculum. This is the input a client brings to EvalSmart, not an EvalSmart output.

What makes a program description "evaluation-ready." You don't need standards, metrics, or a methodology — that's EvalSmart's job. You need to describe your program clearly. A strong description, like the one below, covers:

What the program is and where it runs (its setting)
Who it serves
What it actually does — the activities or services
What it's trying to achieve — the intended outcomes
How it's currently assessed — the data and instruments you already have
Why you're evaluating it, who the audience is, and the specific questions or concerns driving this cycle

Overview

The General Surgery Core Clerkship is a required eight-week rotation for medical students in the core clinical phase of our undergraduate medical education (UME) program. It is a competency-based clerkship organized around developing clinical and technical competence in the care of surgical patients. Students rotate across our main academic medical center and several affiliated community hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers, and are assigned to general surgery teams as well as selected subspecialty services (for example trauma, surgical oncology, and vascular surgery).

Who it's for

The clerkship serves medical students during the core clinical phase of their training. A typical cohort moves through the rotation in blocks across the academic year.

What students do

Day to day, students participate in preoperative clinics, operating-room cases as members of the surgical team, daily inpatient rounds, and postoperative care. They are expected to scrub in and assist on cases, perform basic bedside procedures under supervision (for example suturing and wound care, nasogastric tube placement, and Foley catheter placement), obtain and present surgical histories on rounds, and complete written operative and progress notes. Students attend a weekly surgical skills lab (knot-tying, suturing, and laparoscopic simulation), didactic conferences, and the weekly morbidity-and-mortality conference. Roughly at the midpoint, each student has a formative mid-clerkship feedback meeting with clerkship faculty. The rotation ends with a summative assessment period.

What the clerkship is trying to develop

The clerkship's stated aims are for students to develop competence in five areas: clinical reasoning for surgical patients, patient care (including perioperative management), medical knowledge, basic technical and procedural skills, and professionalism and communication within a surgical team.

How students are assessed

Several sources of assessment information are collected during the clerkship:

The NBME Surgery subject (shelf) examination, taken at the end of the rotation.
End-of-rotation clinical evaluations completed by supervising attending surgeons and residents, who also serve as the students' teachers.
An OSCE with standardized patients, focused on surgical presentations and obtaining informed consent for a common procedure.
A technical-skills assessment in the simulation lab (knot-tying and suturing checklist).
Operative case logs maintained by students recording the cases they attended and their role in each.
Written operative and progress notes submitted over the rotation.

Supervision is provided by attending surgeons and residents at each site, who both teach and rate the students.

Why we want to evaluate the clerkship

Each year the clerkship goes through a continuous quality improvement (CQI) review, and the results feed our UME curriculum committee. As an accredited UME program we are accountable for the quality and consistency of this required clerkship. The clerkship director and the curriculum committee are the primary audiences for this evaluation, and they use it to make annual CQI decisions and to refine the assessment system.

Leadership's specific concerns this cycle:

Are students actually achieving the intended competencies — including basic technical and procedural skills — by the end of the clerkship?
Is assessment consistent across our sites? We have noticed variability in the clinical-evaluation scores coming from different hospitals, and we are not sure whether that reflects real differences in students or differences in how busy services and raters evaluate.
Is the student experience equitable across sites — in particular, do students at different sites get comparable hands-on operative and procedural opportunity, not just comparable scores?
Where can we strengthen the assessment system overall — especially our assessment of technical and procedural skills, which currently rests largely on a brief simulation-lab check and on subjective faculty impressions of students in the operating room?

We are bringing this to an evaluator to help us turn these concerns into a sound, defensible evaluation plan for the clerkship.

See what EvalSmart produces from this description: the case study · a short sample of the plan

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