Overview: Welcome Letter

• Welcome Letter
• Contacts
• Preference Form
• Delay of Examinations and/or Required Coursework, Absences/Clinical Responsibilities and Extended Delays in Required Clerkship/Courses

• A Medical Student's Guide to Surgery
• A Reflection on Surgery
• Orientation
• Student Duties and On-Call Information
• Lecture Series Syllabus
• Feed Forward Policy
• Mistreatment Policy

          If you have any questions, contact Stacey Owen.

Third Year Medical Students on Surgery

Dear Students:

We are pleased to welcome you to the Department of Surgery. We hope to provide an environment which acquaints you with diseases which are addressed by surgical management. We also hope you will see that surgery encompasses much more than the operating room. Surgeons are involved in the comprehensive care of their patients including pre-operative assessment and post-operative care. Although surgery as a specialty is obviously identified with the therapeutic art of an operation, the perioperative and long-term care of such patients is an equally important aspect of the discipline of surgery.

It is not our intention on this rotation to turn all of you into surgeons. It is our hope that you will establish an appreciation of the role of operative procedures and surgical principles in the care of patients. We hope you will appreciate the proper surgical intervention for common as well as uncommon diseases. Especially if your eventual career choice is in a non-surgical field, it is important that you learn both the value and the limitations of operations in a variety of diseases, as your patients will be asking your advice in those situations in the future.

Although the faculty has the ultimate responsibility for providing education during the clerkship, your education in surgery is very much a team effort involving our surgical house staff. We hope you will establish close relationships with the surgical house staff and faculty and join them in the care of patients. Our house staff have an excellent record of education with the students, having won many teaching awards. We are proud of this involvement of our house staff and hope their efforts add to your education.

We also encourage you to learn by discovery, which implies independent reading, study and discussion of new experiences and diseases that you will encounter. We think the process of self-education is especially important to learning. The evolution of medicine is so rapid that it is necessary for every physician to be responsible for self-education and for the education of others around him.

Your individual educational experience on the clerkship will require you to assign priorities for your time. We encourage you to come to the operating room and participate in operations. We expect, however, that you will place the faculty lecture series and tutorials as your first priority. Teaching conferences should take precedence over time spent in the operating room, unless an unusual situation should arise. We also encourage you to be present in the operating room when possible to see the pathologic process for which the operation is being performed. The lecture series has been specifically designed to provide information which will cover most of the surgical fields in a more complete fashion than is possible to be obtained otherwise during a relatively short clerkship.

You will be ably assisted in the logistics of the course by Ms. Stacey Owen. She will arrange your rotation schedules and be available as a resource person for questions of any kind (966-4781).

Again, we want to extend to you our enthusiasm for your presence and hope your experience in surgery will be challenging, stimulating and rewarding.

Sincerely,

Anthony A. Meyer, M. D.
Chairman, Department of Surgery