Curriculum

Deliberate practice

• A stated standard for every skill, not a vague expectation
• Focused repetition against that standard
• Feedback the same day, while the case is still fresh — and usually one-to-one, at whatever moment is right for the resident
• Difficulty that rises as you become reliable

Journal club

• Sessions built on topics that are either fundamental to anesthesia or where genuine controversy still exists
• Two or three landmark papers per session, with full text provided
• Residents learn to read a paper critically rather than accept its abstract

The tutorial programme

• Small-group teaching modelled on the Oxford and Cambridge tutorial system
• Residents receive a clinical case in advance with deliberately general prompts, and prepare independently
• In the session they think aloud — saying what they would do, then defending why against a faculty member who presses on the reasoning, not the recall
• Nothing is submitted. Residents are physicians; the assessment is the quality of the argument they make out loud
• Oral board preparation from day one. We do not reserve it for the third year — learning to organize and defend a plan under questioning starts in the first months
• It also teaches something the boards only approximate: how to discuss the important parts of a patient’s care clearly, with colleagues who need to act on what you say

Also in the curriculum

• Weekly case-based lectures across a full curricular sequence
• Grand Rounds
• Multidisciplinary conferences and morbidity and mortality review
• Mock oral examinations and objective structured clinical examinations
• Protected didactic time — residents are released from clinical duty for it