Message from the Surgery Program Director

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The faculty of the Creighton Phoenix Department of Surgery are proud of the diverse and abundant operative experience that our program provides our trainees.  We also recognize that we must seek to balance the realities of surgery training, ACGME, and ABS requirements with the needs and wants of the trainees who are no longer students but adult learners.

For this to work, we need as much input about how things are working and what could be made better.  We seek this from our residents and faculty in multiple ways.

A wide spectrum of modalities is used to obtain feedback and to work continuously to improve the program, including a Resident Council with elected representatives from each PGY class, “Town Hall” meetings between Program Leadership and residents to review rotations, general ideas, and concerns, and resident participation in our Program Evaluation Committee. In addition, PGY4 residents are actively involved in the program recruitment, interview, and ranking process, and do so on an equal footing with the faculty.

All this does mean of course that the program continues to change. Change is hard, change is necessary, and change is inevitable. What we seek to do is to direct change for the betterment of our trainees so that they can best serve their patients in alignment with our mission, providing them the knowledge, skills, and mindset to be service-oriented surgeons of competence, conscience, and compassion.

Keith Paley, MD
Program Director of Surgery at Creighton University, Phoenix
KeithPaley@creighton.edu