Educational mission
Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center’s Residency Program in Orthopaedic Surgery provides residents with a sound scientific understanding of the discipline, culminating in safe, competent and professional orthopaedic surgeons who have mastered the art of our field.
To meet that goal, a cadre of practicing orthopaedic surgeons forms the volunteer faculty that will guide you along the way. As such, by the time you complete your training, you will come away with a clear vision of the role an orthopaedic surgeon plays in the medical community.
As you advance through the program, your level of responsibility will increase in direct proportion to your level of competence as perceived by the Program Director and the volunteer faculty.
We expect that from the outset of your training, you will focus on mastering the concepts needed for effective non-operative and perioperative management of your patients. Among the specific goals of this process is the ability to develop a sense of recognized clinical scenarios in your practice.
You will learn that the natural history of a given illness or operative procedure can be patterned along a fairly consistent time line, along which certain clinical events should occur with regularity as the patient progresses.
Deviation from an expected pattern should be considered a sign that an untoward event may lie ahead for the patient unless measures are taken. You will therefore be asked to hone your clinical skills and to only obtain assistance from ancillary tests when you believe that the results of these investigations will appreciably alter the manner in which you are managing your patient.
Program Development
As you move into the more senior years, you will be increasingly exposed to the processes of:
- Making decisions relative to the indications and timing of a given operative procedure
- Planning the execution of an operation
- Intraoperative decision making
As senior level residents, you will be expected to take charge of the patients on your service, to learn proper delegation of responsibility to the junior residents, and to pass your knowledge on to your patients and to your junior staff. Finally, throughout your tenure within our training program, you will be accorded ample operating room privileges in direct concert with the technical skills you bring to the table and your understanding of the proper conduct of a given procedure.
It should be apparent that successful progression through this training program mandates that you ascribe to a team approach in fulfilling your duties in education and patient care. As such, you will develop a close relationship with your attending faculty.
At more senior levels you will aid more junior trainees in acquiring and enhancing their skills. Work assignments will be distributed in horizontal (e.g. across the residency) and vertical (e.g. upper level resident to lower level resident) fashion. It is this organizational structure that will enable you to manage your inpatient responsibilities and attend appropriate outpatient clinics, as well as educational conferences within established work hour guidelines.
As you gain familiarity with this patient management system, it is hoped that you will share our belief that continuity of patient care is, from both educational and practical viewpoints, crucial to the success of our discipline.
We feel conscientious patient care is best learned from a "hands-on" approach, guided by a self-imposed plan of directed reading on your patients' illnesses, strengthened by a regular pattern of teaching rounds, and unified by a series of interactive conferences designed to give you a complete overview of the relevant clinical and scientific literature over a repeating two year cycle. We remain confident that, if you take full advantage of this opportunity, you will complete our program well-equipped to progress to the next level of your career, be it the practice of orthopaedic surgery or training in one of the orthopaedic sub-specialties.