Annual Summative Feedback Letters are Associated With Improved End-of-Rotation Surgical Faculty Ratings.

OBJECTIVE

To test the hypothesis that distributing annual summative feedback letters to surgical faculty is associated with increased end-of-rotation resident ratings of faculty.

DESIGN

This is a retrospective study, during which we developed automated, reproducible methods for integrating several feedback elements into annual education letters addressed to each Department of Surgery faculty member. To compare end-of-rotation resident ratings of faculty before versus after the intervention, we obtained all evaluations of 80 faculty members completed by residents during a 5-year period. For each question on these Likert scale evaluations, we compared the distributions of responses before versus after the intervention. We corrected for multiple comparisons with the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure.

SETTING

Academic tertiary care center.

PARTICIPANTS

Department of Surgery faculty and trainees.

RESULTS

There were 37,508 Likert scale responses on our 13-item evaluation of faculty completed by 95 trainees (27,364 before versus 10,144 after the intervention) during the 5-year study period. For all 13 items, the distribution of responses improved in the post-intervention period (all p < 0.03). Additionally, 12 faculty members who ranked in the bottom quartile pre-intervention showed improvement in their evaluation scores from a mean of 3.96 (3.93-3.99) pre-intervention to 4.12 (4.08-4.16) post-intervention (p < 0.05). Across nine out of 13 evaluation items, the post-intervention distributions shifted towards higher ratings compared with the pre-intervention period (all p < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

Providing annual summative feedback letters to surgical faculty was associated with improved resident ratings of faculty. As in other areas of clinical surgical practice, comparative performance data may encourage focused improvement.