Bridging the Gap: Theoretical Principles Behind Surgical Boot Camps

The transition from medical school to residency is often considered the most difficult year for both teachers and learners. Previous work suggests incorporating a boot camp at the onset of residency can be a highly effective mechanism for easing the transition between medical school and residency by improving trainees’ medical knowledge, confidence, and procedural and technical skills before they start to care for patients. As other programs look to adopt this training method, medical educators must understand how novice trainees acquire new skills and thus why boot camps are effective. This chapter reviews theoretical principles from Motor Learning, Cognitive Psychology, and Education Science to explain the attentional demands of novice skill acquisition, what practice strategies promote novice learning, and how these can be applied in a boot camp setting. The goal of this chapter is to provide educators with information on how to be successful in the development and implementation of their own boot camps.