By Dr. Daniel B. Jones, President 2017-2018, SAGES
You have finished fellowship, but want to be a better surgeon. Until recently, you went into clinical practice, read textbooks, watched video and attended SAGES Annual Meeting. To get recertified you might read SESAP and learn a lot about vascular and transplant and other topics totally unrelated to your practice in order to get MOC CME.
SAGES UNIVERSITY creates a new paradigm for lifelong learning after residency/fellowship with the MASTERS Program. The Program organizes the SAGES educational offerings from a Competency Curriculum, to Proficiency Curriculum, to a Mastery Curriculum. Lectures at the ANNUAL Meeting are numbered 100, 200 and 300 to indicate level of complexity from basic to complex, reoperative surgery.
Enrolling in the MASTERS Program is totally voluntary. You may participate in one or all eight of the pathways (Biliary, Foregut, Hernia, Colon, Bariatric, Acute Care, Endoscopy, Robotic Surgery) Once you sign up, the lectures you attend and videos you watch will be credited to your transcript. Your transcript will track your completion of FLS, FES, FUSE, ERAS, SafeChole, SMART, SAGES Guidelines, Select Articles, SAGES Pearls, and SAGES Top 21 Videos.
The special sauce of the MASTERS Program is our use of social media. For each pathway, SAGES will host a closed Facebook group for surgeons to log on and discuss cases. In addition, surgeons will use the group to submit anchoring operations for crowd sourcing feedback. For example, in the Acute Care Competency Curriculum, surgeons will submit a Lap Appendectomy video. In the Foregut Mastery Curriculum, surgeons will submit a video clip of a redo Nissen fundoplication or Heller myotomy for feedback. The social media groups will start to come online at the 2017 SAGES Annual Meeting in Houston.
The Proficiency curriculum requires surgeons to enroll into a registry like NSQIP, MBSQIP or ACS. For completion of the Mastery curriculum surgeons will need to report their outcomes. Also as part of the Mastery curriculum surgeons will learn more about mentoring and coaching. The MASTERS program does not label a surgeon competent or master surgeon. SAGES will verify that you have completed the Competency, Proficiency or Mastery Curriculum.
So, you no longer need to write a check for SESAP. As a SAGES member you can register for the MASTERS Program for free.
Visit https://www.sages.org/masters-program/ for additional information.