Redefining surgery education and leadership, vision for medical directors: A literature review

Abstract

Introduction: Management of Education is nowadays a topic that needs to be rethought and reexamined, considering the acuity of the competition among universities and the global need for competent healthcare systems. This article helps the program directors of surgical specialties to link the medical knowledge to educational, social and behavioral principles and theories through analysis of literature from a learning and managerial perspective adding a leadership vision to surgery. Through this literature review analysis we tried to explore how surgery education is integrated into the learning framework and how the understanding of leadership concepts can help medical directors to better manage their surgical programs.
Methods: 78 articles from medical and non-medical articles were collected and 30 articles were reviewed based on previously selected keywords: social learning, learning theories in surgery, community of practice, role model theories and leadership. 14 articles from medical journals were finally selected and linked to the findings of 17 nonmedical journals in order to be able to propose practical steps that help medical directors to improve the surgical training programs based on leadership and learning concepts.
Findings: Four aspects of learning where reviewed and discussed: 1) Learning theories, concepts, and perspective, 2) Learning Strategies, 3) Learning context and 4) Learning outcomes. After exploring the aspects of surgery education, the collected information were reviewed, regrouped and analyzed by integrating surgery education aspects into learning. The literature lacks papers that link between the general aspects of learning and surgery education that may potentially help medical directors in designing evidence-based programs. To fill this theoretical gap a model showing the areas of integration between learning and surgery education was proposed. The transformational leadership concept was identified as a good aspect that medical directors should look at while understanding its aspect and how to adapt it and integrate it in their management styles.
Conclusion: Surgery education was always linked to the competency-based and student-centered approaches while degrading the importance of the behavioral, social and managerial aspects of learning.