EVALUATION OF THE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT OF POSTGRADUATE SURGICAL TEACHING

learning and self & peer-assessing process especially in the undergraduate years. This is happening because of increasing patient awareness of their rights in our new healthcare world of increased consultant responsibility; and implementation in the UK health institutions of the ‘European Working Time Directive ’ and ‘Modernization of Medical Careers’. The study was conducted to determine the change if any in the education environment of postgraduate surgical teaching in a leading teaching hospital in London when a teacher-centred, old-fashioned postgraduate teaching approach was replaced with a student-centred, self-assessment, portfolio-based approach. Method: Postgraduate Hospital Educational Environment Measure (PHEEM). Twenty postgraduate trainees filled in the questionnaire before and after the change in their learning / teaching pattern. Results: The response rate was 100%. No statistically significant difference in the overall score for the two teaching environments (p=0.8024, 95 % CI =-5.549273 to 4.349273) was found, because the loss of on-call rooms, trainee’s mess and catering services statistically significantly deteriorated the social support subscale of the PHEEM scale (p<0.0001, 95 % CI=6.66752 to 13.03248) to counteract any statistically significant improvement in the teaching role perception subscale of the instrument (p=0.001, 95 % CI =-12.443896 to-4.856104). There was no statistically significant difference in the role autonomy perception subscale in the two methods (p=0.3663, 95 % CI =-5.870437 to 2.270437). Conclusions: A student-centred approach to postgraduate teaching is better than a teacher-centred approach. However, further studies will be needed to evaluate both postgraduate teaching and training environment