RISE Articles

Promoting Patient and Family Perceptions of Resident Involvement in Surgical Care

(Posted September 2023)

The balance between increasing learner autonomy and ensuring patient safety is a fundamental difficulty in surgical education. While a great deal of literature continues to be published on the optimization of this interaction, much less is known about the perspectives of the other stakeholders in this equation: the patients. While the ethical considerations of allowing trainees to be involved in patient care are largely deemed to be both permissible and necessary, the process of informing the patient of this aspect and ensuring their permission is less clear, especially in surgical fields.