The newest edition of Surgical Education and Self-Assessment Program (SESAP®), which officially will be launched at this month’s Clinical Congress 2022, is a premier educational resource for practicing surgeons and surgery residents. The 18th edition continues the legacy of providing the highest-quality, peer-reviewed content.
With SESAP 18, the ACS promotes surgical excellence through an innovative educational model to reinforce learning and foster mastery of content.
“SESAP 18 continues the tradition of introducing novel educational features in each new edition, based on the latest educational underpinnings and evolving needs of practicing surgeons and surgery residents,” according to Ajit K. Sachdeva, MD, FACS, FRCSC, FSACME, MAMSE, Director of the ACS Division of Education. “Several new features have been added to SESAP 18 to enhance personalized education and promote expertise.”
New Personalized Assessments and Returning Features
For individuals who wish to incorporate SESAP 18 into their regular routines, the SESAP Small Bites feature allows subscribers to receive links to SESAP 18 questions via email by selecting the frequency and desired topic areas. For the first time, SESAP subscribers will be able to create personalized assessments that randomly select questions from across one or more specified categories. Participants will be able specify the number of questions, the category or categories to be used, and whether to select only questions that were answered incorrectly.
These new custom assessments will allow each surgeon to create unique assessments targeted to individual study. SESAP 18 also allows participants to easily create personalized flashcards and save them by category for future reference. Finally, new progress reports for residents can easily be shared with program directors and will include comparisons of scores with resident peers completing SESAP.
These new features build on others introduced with SESAP 17, which was the first edition to offer packages that may be purchased by category. Likewise, the program offers the ability to highlight and save text, bookmark and notate content in custom library folders, target searches quickly across categories, and compare scores and answer selections with peers. As SESAP 18 Program Director John A. Weigelt, MD, DVM, FACS, MAMSE, said, “SESAP 18 continues the evolution of making the program more user-friendly and valuable as an educational activity. We believe SESAP 18 is continuing a terrific heritage as a CME [continuing medical education] activity for general surgeons.”
SESAP 18 contains more questions than the previous edition, with a total of 665 multiple-choice questions in nine major areas of general surgery: abdomen, alimentary tract, breast, emergency general surgery, endocrine, legal/ethics, perioperative care, surgical critical care, and trauma. A total of 38 surgeon authors contributed to the program using a rigorous peer-review process to provide expanded critiques that offer evidence-based explanations of all the answer choices, as well as supporting references from the literature.
Participants in SESAP 18 can earn up to 168 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. In addition, Education Credits of Excellence are again being offered for those surgeons who wish to pursue a higher level of achievement, and SESAP 18 content is available by category to accommodate their goals.
SESAP 18 Advanced
Because of the success and popularity of SESAP 17 Advanced, the Advanced series will continue with SESAP 18 Advanced, which will be released in summer 2023. SESAP 18 Advanced will feature additional in-depth content for surgeons seeking greater knowledge in specific areas. Modules will address clinical problems in areas of greater complexity or that may be still evolving, including:
- Abdomen
- Alimentary tract
- Breast
- Emergency general surgery/trauma
- Endocrine
- Melanoma, sarcoma, and soft tissue/skin malignancies
- Surgical critical care
More information is available on the ACS website at facs.org/sesap.
