The American College of Surgeons as an advocate for global surgery awareness.

The American College of Surgeons (ACS), founded in 1913, is the one of the oldest surgical professional organizations in the United States. Originally founded to foster surgical professional excellence and collaboration among surgeons in North America, the ACS has now expanded to over 80,000 members worldwide with programs delivering a rich portfolio of professional services in the domains of surgical education, clinical surgery and global surgery, surgical quality and leadership, surgical research, member services. ACS international programs initially focused on international professional exchange and hosting of young surgeons from around the world in US based surgical centers to develop scholarly and clinical collaborations. Over the last 20 years, with the founding of the ACS-Operation Giving Back (OGB) Program, the ACS has broadened its international perspective to support surgical care in emerging nations and to develop collaborative programs with host institutions in emerging nations to support surgical care capacity growth through on site partnerships, and educational and policy initiatives. To that end, in recent years, OGB has developed global surgical programs in the COSECSA region of sub-Saharan Africa creating opportunities to participate in Global Surgical Training Hubs. After developing a pilot hub project in Hawassa, Ethiopia, OGB is now in the process of scaling up two additional sites. In this manuscript, we will describe ACS's rich history of activities promoting international surgical collaboration and scholarship and discuss the process of creating the global surgical training hub model in Hawassa.

Gender Representation by Specialty Track at Surgical Meetings: The American and Australasian Experiences.

BACKGROUND: We compared the representation of women panelists at two large, general interest surgical meetings: the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Clinical Congress and Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) Scientific Congress. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We performed comprehensive analyses of panels and panelists at ACS and RACS meetings (2013-2018). Manual review was conducted to determine counts and proportions of invited panelists by gender. We made within- and between-meeting comparisons regarding gender representation by specialty track. Tracks were characterized after our review of meeting programs. RESULTS: There were 4542 panelists and 1390 panels at RACS from 2013 to 2018. At ACS, there were 3363 panelists over 693 panels. The specialty tracks with the highest proportion of men-only panels were transplant (75%) and cardiothoracic (63%) at ACS and cardiothoracic (83%) and multidisciplinary (81%) at RACS. The lowest proportions of men-only panels were in breast and pediatric surgery at ACS (5% and 11%, respectively) and breast and rural surgery at RACS (24% and 36%, respectively). At ACS, the highest proportions of women panelists were on panels in breast (63%) and endocrine surgery (48%) and in breast (44%) and rural surgery (33%) at RACS, while the lowest proportion of women panelists were in transplant (10%) and cardiothoracic (14%) at ACS and multidisciplinary (8%) and cardiothoracic (7%) at RACS. CONCLUSIONS: There is a persistent difference in gender representation at surgical meetings, particularly within certain subspecialties. Program chairs and committees could increase the proportion of women by focusing on who serves as panelists overall and within specialty tracks.

"Filler-ins" to Physicians: History of the Otolaryngology Training Program at Mayo Clinic.

The first officially recognized otolaryngology resident at Mayo Clinic started training in 1908. In the following years, the residency program evolved through emerging national standards and regulations for medical education, declining and resurgent interest in the specialty, and radical changes in otolaryngology as a practice. This article details the growth of the Mayo Clinic otolaryngology residency program, often in the words of the pioneering physicians involved in the process, from "filler-ins" for the staff to today's nationally recognized program.

Implementation of a Radio-frequency Identification System to Improve the Documentation and Compliance of Attending Physicians' Arrival to Trauma Activations.

Background The documentation of physician arrival is an important component of trauma resuscitation. The American College of Surgeons (ACS) requires attending physicians at Level I and Level II trauma centers to arrive to the most critical traumas, full trauma team activations (full activations), within 15 minutes at 80% compliance, and to limited trauma team activations (limited activations) within a timely manner, which we designated as 60 minutes. However, our institution's rates of documentation and compliance using a paper-based trauma flowsheet (TFS) were found to be well below the 80% compliance rate. Methods Physicians began using a radio-frequency identification (RFID) badge to swipe into the emergency department (ED) upon arrival to the trauma room. Arrival times were taken from the swipes data and used to supplement missing or non-compliant times on the TFS. If a TFS was missing a time, it was considered both undocumented and noncompliant. A two-proportion z-test was used to compare the rates of documentation and compliance before and after the addition of swipes data. Results Documentation rates for full activations rose from 76% to 90%. Compliance rates for full activations rose from 70% (below the requirement) to 84% (compliant). Limited activation documentation and compliance rose significantly from 47.2% and 45.3% to 67.4% and 63.4%, respectively. Total documentation rose significantly from 49.9% to 69.7%. We went from below compliance to above compliance with the addition of the RFID system. Conclusion The use of the RFID technology improved the rates of documentation and compliance of attending physician arrival to trauma activations. Rates rose between 14 and 20 percentage points in each category, significantly in total documentation and in limited activation documentation and compliance. The addition of RFID swipes data made our rates improve to become compliant.