Factors Associated with Successful Performance in an Orthopaedic Surgery Residency

With all of the constraints facing residency programs today, such as increasing work-hour restrictions, a changing economy and its accompanying financial pressures, and the current generation of physicians' enhanced interest in lifestyle quality, it is imperative for orthopaedic educators to identify and select the best possible residents to fill our residency programs. Several recent editorials from major orthopaedic journals have discussed identifying resident quality and maximizing success during residency. One such commentary stressed that continuously refining and improving resident education and training are of the utmost importance to the future of orthopaedic surgery (and, indeed, to the future of medicine) because doing so today will facilitate the continued recruitment of top medical students to orthopaedic surgery1. In another recent editorial, in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (American Volume), Deputy Editor Marc Swiontkowski remarked that the Orthopaedic Residency Review Committee's expanded role within the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has recently enabled us to attain a number of important goals in postgraduate education with respect to interviewing and selecting candidates for residency as well as educating and counseling residents during residency2. In order to build on these improvements, Swiontkowski stressed that we must continue to innovate and improve all aspects of orthopaedic surgery postgraduate education. Therefore, it is important for orthopaedic surgery postgraduate training programs to evaluate the means by which they identify and select the candidates who are likely to succeed during residency and, ultimately, in practice. Moreover, identifying predictors or factors associated with success during orthopaedic surgery residency is critical knowledge for program directors, selection committees, and students. Currently and for the last twenty years, resident selection decisions have been made by a committee of faculty at our institution that reviews all of the applications and then generates a consensus ranking …