Over the past several months, Surgical Governance has been refining the pathway for shadows in the OR. Job shadows help intrigue our community’s future health care team — but also can be tricky to arrange with an eye toward safe and exceptional experience for patients, staff, physicians and shadower! There was no standard in place for the OR, so our goal was to align our process as close as possible to what already exists in the Volunteer Office.
If you have acquaintances who are interested in a medical career and would like to shadow you as a surgeon or anesthesiologist, we now have a standard pathway to process these individuals to ensure that they have a safe and valuable shadow. The details and standard work documentation will be forwarded to you under separate cover.
Some key points:
Thank you for your patience as we developed this process. We look forward to opening up this opportunity.
On a related note, a similar pathway was developed for enabling non-credentialed, non-privileged physicians or health care professionals to also shadow in the OR. It is essentially identical to the student shadow process. This documentation will also be forwarded on to you through your section chiefs.
Remember that this pathway is for shadowing only. These individuals will not be allowed to scrub or participate in the procedure in any way whatsoever. This is simply a means for them to watch the procedure and carry with them learning points that they can take back to their institution, practice, etc.