Graduate medical education programs bear the important task of preparing graduate physicians for practice in an ever-changing clinical landscape, requiring trainees to be competent in healthcare improvement strategies that may assist them in their careers. The American Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires accredited programs to prepare residents to be capable of demonstrating quality improvement (QI) and patient safety (PS) principles.1 With little formal guidance on how to equip residents with QI skills, curricula in surgical residency programs have been created at various institutions to promote QI practices among their residents.2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Existing surgical residency QI curricula commonly combine didactic instruction with experiential learning to strengthen residents’ understanding and application of QI practices. Formal QI frameworks, such as 6 Sigma or Plan-Do-Study-Act, are often introduced during the didactic sessions, providing a foundational understanding of QI formulation. Several residency programs have described such approaches, focusing on didactic learning with structured opportunities for residents to lead and engage in QI projects.3,5 These strategies have been well received and viewed as educationally relevant by the residents.3,5

Online supplemental material has also been reported as being distributed to surgical residents to aid in their learning process. For instance, at Tulane University School of Medicine, general surgery residents received information regarding QI methodology from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) alongside didactics.6 This approach led to improvements in resident self-assessed knowledge and confidence in QI implementation, accompanied by an increase in resident involvement in QI projects.6

Keeping with our institution’s focus on patient-centered care, our Department of Surgery General Surgery Residency Program developed a 2-year quality and safety curriculum in 2018 to provide a robust learning experience for our surgical residents. We hypothesized that the curriculum would serve to educate residents to be capable of implementing quality and safety methodology in their daily practice.

PS is one of the central focuses of QI initiatives.7 However, within the context of resident QI curricula, it is often less emphasized, with QI content frequently taking precedence in structure and evaluation. While our curriculum’s evaluation remains focused on QI, we attempt to capture improvements in the residents’ understanding of PS principles to address this gap.

Here, we describe our institution’s experience in successfully implementing a formal surgical residency quality and safety curriculum, which has been fully established as part of the educational mission of the residency program. In order to demonstrate programmatic effectiveness, we present indicators of quality and safety understanding by examining resident-authored QI scholarship and scores on a validated assessment tool.