American Board of Surgery
American Board of Surgery Requirements
EPAs
SIMPL EPA
Residents must complete 2 EPAs and 2 OR assessments per week.
Resident must initiate communication with an Attending physician and ask to complete an assessment on them. The Residency Program will not do this for you.
EPAS:
What is an EPA?
- Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) were developed to provide the opportunity for frequent, time-efficient, feedback-oriented and workplace-based assessment in the course of daily clinical workflow. EPAs are an important clinical assessment component of competency-based resident education (CBRE). They offer the opportunity to operationalize competency evaluation and related entrustment decisions in the course of regular patient care, and address some of the challenges educators and trainees have faced in bridging core competency theory into clinical practice and performance assessment.
- It is important to note that EPAs are NOT competencies, but rather a complement to competencies, and serve as a way to translate the broad concept of competency into everyday practice.
- EPAs are units of work a physician performs that can be directly observed - things people do, such as evaluating and managing a patient experiencing a specific medical concern.
- Competencies are broad and foundational domains of ability, such as medical knowledge or interpersonal skills.
- Milestones are capabilities that describe progress at advancing levels of competence along the sequence from novice to expertise.
- A suite of EPAs for a specialty can define the core clinical activities that a resident should exhibit to be deemed competent and worthy of autonomy and entrustment in patient care. Because EPAs are anchored in clinical practice, they allow a way to capture the in-the-moment decisions that attending physicians are already making about how much supervision or autonomy they will give a trainee in a real-world setting and can inform the trainee's progress towards entrustment for a patient's care.
- Residents must complete 2 EPAs per week
- Completing your EPAs will help you meet the ABS clinical and operative assessment requirements.
- Ask an Attending to complete an EPA assessment on you
- Use the SIMPL EPA app
More Resources
ABS Operative & Clinical Assessments
Applicants who complete their general surgery residency training in the 2015-2016 academic year or thereafter will be required to obtain during residency at least 6 operative performance assessments and 6 clinical performance assessments, conducted by their program director or other faculty members.
When signing an individual's application, the program director will be asked to attest that these 12 assessments have been completed. However, the applicant bears ultimate responsibility for ensuring these assessments are performed while in residency.
Operative:
- You need 6 operative assessments to meet ABS requirement
- Ask an Attending to complete an operative assessment on you
- Use the SIIMPL OR app
Clinical:
- You need 6 clinical assessments to meet the ABS requirement
- Ask an Attending to complete an operative assessment on you
- Use the SIMPL EPA app
GAGES
complete during Endoscopy rotation
Requirement :
- You need 1 Colonoscopy (1 required with a score of 18 or higher)
- You need 1 Upper GI Endoscopy (1 required with a score of 18 or higher)
- Ask an Attending to complete an upper or lower GAGES on you; they can log into their Medhub account and view from their list of evals in their dropdown or you can contact the Residency Office and ask them to deliver eval to the designated Attending
- Medhub has the following GAGES forms available for faculty to use: GAGES - Colonoscopy Scoresheet & GAGES - Upper GI Endoscopy Scoresheet
- The ABS announced in 2014 a new requirement to ensure all ABS-certified general surgeons have completed a standard curriculum in the use of endoscopic techniques. This new requirement will apply to certification applicants who complete their residency training in the 2017-2018 academic year or thereafter.
- During their general surgery residency, applicants will be required to have completed the ABS Flexible Endoscopy Curriculum (pdf).
Residents will be trained in basic upper and lower endoscopy, augmenting their endoscopy suite experience with cases in the ICU and operating room. Technical progress is assessed during this block using the Global Assessment of Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Skills (GAGES). GAGES scores should be recorded for residents at baseline and then at least intermittently through the course of their endoscopic experience. The goal is for residents to consistently achieve a GAGES score of ≥ 18 during their procedures. There should also be exposure to multidisciplinary GI meetings such as pathology conferences and GI conferences.
LEVEL IV (Typically completed in PGY-3 or -4) This initial senior experience encompasses improvements in both cognitive and technical skills with cases assessed using GAGES to achieve a minimum score of 18 for both upper and lower endoscopy — a score achieved by “experienced” endoscopists during the GAGES validation studies. Residents continue with more advanced cognitive modules for therapeutic endoscopic techniques. Clinical experience for residents, outside of their dedicated endoscopy experience, should take place in the operating room and ICU, and continued work in the endoscopy suite of the home institution or other affiliated or associated institutions is encouraged.
How to Install SIMPL Apps
SIMPL OR and SIMPL 2.0 aka SIMPL EPA
SIMPL EPA
CLICK HERE for iPhone download
CLICK HERE for Android download
SIMPL OR
CLICK HERE for iPhone download
CLICK HERE for Android download
Taking the QE in the PGY4 Year
Program Policy:
1. Score at least 75% correct on the ABS In-Training Exam