A study of resident proficiency with thyroid surgery: Creation of a thyroid-specific tool

Objective: Creation and testing of a tool, Hemithyroidectomy-Specific Scale (HSS), to evaluate performance of a hemithyroidectomy. Study Design: Prospective, multi-center study of our HSS tool versus a Global Scale (GS). Setting: Two tertiary care academic medical centers. Subjects and Methods: Sixteen unique residents (postgraduate years [PGY] 2-5) evaluated a total of 97 times with a performance tool by a single endocrine surgeon evaluator (B.C.S.). Results: Overall, the reliability of both evaluation instruments was good. Cronbach's alpha was 0.972 for the GS and 0.959 for the HSS. This indicates high internal consistency of each instrument. In general, the scores increased with increasing PGY level, indicating reasonable construct validity. Conclusion: This study describes a new HSS checklist type of evaluation instrument for hemithyroidectomy and compares it to a validated GS. HSS offers advantages to GS. Most residents reached competence in hemithyroidectomy by the PGY4 level. A large, multi-institutional study would be required for adequate evaluation of our tool prior to its routine use in resident evaluations.