ASE 2026 Annual Meeting Program

Session Description: Departments of Surgery face unprecedented financial pressure in the current climate while still being asked to deliver excellence in education as well as patient care and research. How do we keep faculty engaged, support surgical training, and protect well-being when “margin is the mission”? This panel will share practical, creative strategies for balancing finances, incentivization, and mission in the current times.

Session Objective 1: Attendees will better understand the financial funds flow and its impact on the missions of an academic surgical department

Session Objective 2: Attendees will be able to envision alternative, non-monetary strategies for incentivizing faculty.

Session Objective 3: Attendees will be able to think creatively about funding sources for surgical education endeavors in their own departments.

Session Objective 4: To allow attendees to cultivate ideas for mitigating burnout and building wellness amidst relentless financial pressure.

Session Description: Surgeons and trainees face some of the highest rates of burnout, depression, and suicide across the health professions—yet these struggles often remain unspoken, hidden behind a culture of silence and resilience at all costs. This panel will create a space for open, honest dialogue within the surgical education community by bringing together voices of people in the surgical community with a lived experience with mental health struggles from different perspectives, including personal, peer, leadership, and mental health expert perspectives. Through storytelling, personal reflection, and data-driven insights, the session will illuminate the lived experience of mental health challenges in surgery and the profound consequences of unaddressed distress. By engaging with both the human stories and the structural challenges, this session will empower educators, program leaders, and trainees to return to their institutions prepared to champion a cultural shift—one where mental health is protected with the same urgency as surgical skill and patient outcomes.

Session Objective 1: Develop awareness of the scope and urgency of the mental health crisis in surgery, supported by data and real-world narratives

Session Objective 2: Identify communication strategies to help break the silence, foster psychological safety, and normalize help-seeking behaviors within training programs

Session Objective 3: Apply practical tools for early recognition of warning signs and for initiating supportive, nonjudgmental conversations with colleagues and trainees

Session Objective 4: Formulate institutional approaches to building proactive systems of outreach, peer support, and access to care that reduce barriers and stigma

Session Description: Failure to rescue in surgical care is when a complication does not receive timely and appropriate treatment leading to further complications, disability, or even death.  FTR often involves the trifecta of delayed recognition, delayed communication and/or delayed action.  These clinical enterprise concepts are pertinent in surgical education as well.  Unfortunately, trainees and faculty at different stages often struggle in their competencies, as a complication of training.  Similar to clinical failure to rescue, delays in recognition, delayed communication and/or delayed action result in significant, negative downstream effects on career and well-being.  In this panel, we aim to cover struggling learners spanning UME, GME and faculty.

In this panel, panelists use case scenarios to:

1. discuss examples of failure to rescue in surgical education
2. enumerate points of rescue
3. evaluate strategies to rescue
4. draw parallels between clinical enterprise processes and educational failure to rescue.

At the conclusion of the session, attendees will:
-Have tools to address the “failure to rescue” in a more confident and productive manner
-Be able to recognize a struggling learner/faculty member
-Have strategies for early intervention and avoid the “failure to rescue”

Session Description: The reality of modern surgical training faces the paradox of duty-hour limits, increased patient safety expectations, and rising burnout risk all competing for the same finite resource of time. Simulation-based education has proven to enhance operative performance and improve patient outcomes, yet integrating simulation into residency curricula without exceeding duty hours or compromising wellness remains a major challenge.

This panel, led by simulation directors, program leaders, and education scientists, will explore strategies to align simulation, wellness, and duty-hour compliance within the modern residency framework. We will highlight data showing that proficiency-based progression (PBP) and mastery learning models lead to faster skill acquisition and better performance compared to time-based training. We will also review findings linking structured simulation curricula to improved patient safety outcomes.

Panelists will illustrate real-world scheduling innovations that optimize skill development within duty-hour boundaries. Attendees will participate in an interactive “design sprint” to create a mini-4-week “Clock-Smart” simulation plan tailored to their own institutions.

The discussion will also connect simulation with well-being and ACGME’s updated guidance on fatigue mitigation. By merging data-driven scheduling with evidence-based education, this session models a holistic approach to developing technically competent, psychologically resilient surgeons.

Attendees will leave with:
• Practical templates for time-efficient simulation integration
• Benchmarked metrics for skill acquisition, wellness tracking, and compliance
• A structured planning tool for implementing a “Clock-Smart” curriculum at their home program.

This panel embodies ASE’s mission to advance surgical education through innovation, collaboration, and actionable takeaways. Participants will engage directly through live polling, design exercises, and facilitated reflection to ensure an interactive session that moves beyond lecture to collective problem solving.

Session Description: Preference signaling was first implemented in the resident recruitment process in the 2021-2022 match as an attempt to provide an objective metric for program directors (PDs) to identify applicants highly interested in their program while decreasing interview hoarding, which had been highly prevalent since the transition to virtual interviews in 2020. In 2024, the Association for Program Directors in Surgery (APDS) increased the number of signals per applicant from 5 to 15. In an attempt to study the impact of this change, the Surgical Education Research Committee (SERC), Graduate Surgical Education Committee (GSEC), and the Collaboration of Surgical Education Fellows (CoSEF) undertook several research projects this past year, funded by the ASE, to investigate PD, medical student advisor, and applicant experiences with and attitudes toward the current preference signaling system. These mixed methods studies involved semi-structured interviews with the aforementioned stakeholder groups, qualitative thematic analysis, followed by a survey of general surgery PDs and applicants based on the themes identified. 

While many commonalities between groups were noted, such as a common understanding of the purpose of preference signaling and a need for greater transparency regarding how programs are using signals, stakeholder opinions diverged in key areas, such as how applicants should be allocating their signals and attitudes toward home or visiting sub-interns signaling their home institution. These results highlight a need for discourse between stakeholder groups with respect to the future of preference signaling. Therefore, we propose a preference signaling panel at ASE this year. Panelists will include program directors, medical school advisors, and general surgery residents from both community and academic programs, as well as a representative from the APDS signaling task force. This panel will start with a summary of the APDS signaling task force and SERC/GSE/CoSEF signaling working group findings, followed by a panel discussion of these results. The panel discussion will be structured around common themes identified in previous preference signaling work, aiming to provide pragmatic guidance on: how general surgery residency applicants should determine their competitiveness and allocate their signals, how general surgery program directors can approach interpreting signals to improve efficiency in application review, how many signals per applicant is the ideal number, how much transparency general surgery programs should provide to applicants regarding how they use signals, whether home and visiting sub-interns should signal their home or visiting institutions, and how the approach to signaling may vary for applicants who are international medical graduates, DO students, couples matching, or dual applying. The discussion will highlight where stakeholder perspectives align or diverge.

This signaling panel represents a unique integration of three major stakeholder vantage points (PDs, applicants, and medical student advisors) and will provide a holistic understanding of preference signaling. Such cross-stakeholder discourse is critical to shaping an inclusive, transparent, and evidence-driven future for surgical recruitment.