Continuing Medical Education in Emergency Plastic Surgery for Referring Physicians: A Prospective Assessment of Educational Needs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Continuing medical education for referring physicians is an essential part of raising the profile of plastic surgery and improving patient care. The authors conducted a prospective cohort study to assess the educational needs of emergency and primary care physicians who refer patients to the on-call plastic surgeon. METHODS: The following information was collected for telephone referrals from emergency and primary care physicians over a 1-year period: date, location of referral center, population of referral center, distance between referral center and tertiary care hospital, patient age, presenting problem, anatomical location of the problem, and treatment plan proposed by the plastic surgeon. In addition, the 50 physicians who most frequently referred patients were surveyed to identify which topics they perceived to be of the highest educational utility and which were frequently encountered. RESULTS: There were a total of 1077 referrals to on-call plastic surgeons, mostly for trauma (83 percent) and injuries involved primarily the upper extremity (65 percent) or head and neck regions (26 percent). Five percent or more of all referrals involved mandible, phalangeal, metacarpal, or zygomatico-orbital complex fractures, minor burns, flexor tendon injuries, single digits requiring revision of an amputation, and extensor tendon injuries. Referring physicians reported that the topics of most educational utility were management of hand infections, minor burns, nasal fractures, boxer's fractures, complex facial lacerations, frostbite, metacarpal fractures, and scaphoid fractures. CONCLUSIONS: To have the greatest potential affect on changing physicians' behavior and improving patient care, continuing medical education should focus on traumatic injuries to the upper extremity and head and neck regions. A prioritized list of topics should include management of minor burns, hand fractures, hand infections, nasal infections, and complex facial lacerations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".