General Surgery Residency Program Welcome

Reese Randle MD

I'd say what makes us unique as a program here at Wake Forest are the people. The relationships that the residents have with each other, with the faculty, the relationships that the faculty have, I don't think that can be matched. The residents here are treated like partners and peers and not like workers set to make our lives easier as faculty. I think we work together very well, and those relationships really are what create a very fun culture to be a part of. We serve both an urban and rural population, and some of the places we serve have very little access to care, so we do see patients present with very advanced pathology as well as the normal bread and butter stuff that you might expect for a general surgeon to encounter. So our residents get a great experience in a variety of different clinical settings. We've got a great relationship with the residents. We've got a lot of faculty that have been here for a while, and there's not a lot of turnover, which is fairly unique in an academic program, and it breeds an environment where the residents feel like part of a team and they work well together, they work hard, I'd say they're probably the hardest working people in this hospital, and that makes me really proud, but they are definitely our greatest strength. Wellness has become a much bigger focus in recent years here in our program, and we have several things that we do and maintain to increase the wellness opportunities for the residents. The institution does provide a lot of benefits. Your health, your dental, your eye, life and disability insurance, those standard things are provided by the institution. The institution also provides an onsite gym workout facility for the residents. There are resident lounges. We provide a communal area for our surgery residents as well as offices for each class. We also fund social events for the residents on a monthly basis where they get together and hang out and send us the bill. We do have limitations with that, but it's one of the ways that our department tries to support the residents in such a hard endeavor like general surgery training. Graduated responsibility is baked into the DNA of this program. To be honest with you, residency is geared towards increasing responsibility and entrustment as we go. The American Board of Surgery has been instrumental in releasing entrustable professional activities as a way that we will progress residents through their training. However, each year there are certain rotations that the residents do that increase that weight of responsibility. The second year, it's the burn and ICU services that they're running and supervising interns. On the third year, they run the consult service, which, in my opinion, runs the hospital. The fourth year is the trauma experience where the fourth year resident runs the trauma service, which is a huge team of APPs and residents. And then the fifth year we have our chairman service where the chief resident is responsible for their own elective practice, and at night, they serve as junior faculty supervising all of the more nocturnal services, the services that don't really shut down. These are all in addition to the other services that they rotate on, but each year, we're intentional about making sure that they have some experience that stretches them to their limits of what they're capable and comfortable doing. Most of the mentorship that occurs happens organically, and I think that we've got a very good environment to cultivate that where our residents and our faculty interact quite a bit, and the faculty genuinely care about the residents. And so it makes for a comfortable way for those connections to be made and for residents to kind of self-identify who they think would be a good mentor for them. We train capable, confident, collegial, general surgeons who care about their patients and are devoted to each other and who are the best surgeon in their chosen environment. We don't have a cookie cutter mold of how we want you to look when you come out of here. We want to adapt our program and your experience to what you want in your career with the one caveat that we want you to be the best surgeon in the environment that you choose.