•Royal College of Surgeon of Thailand has included research program during general surgical training for the last 8 years (since 2006). Every surgical trainee will be assigned for one research topic. Oral presentation at the designated National Surgical Conferences and research manuscript are compulsory and required to be completed before graduation.

•This study aims to analyze the results and identify the area that we can improve both the outcomes and maintain good surgical research attitudes after their completion of surgical training.

• The study was carried out with the approval of Ethics Committee of Faculty of Medicine, Thammasat University and Ethical Committee of the Royal College of Surgeon of Thailand on 2012. Surgical graduates between the year 2006-2011 were selected. Questionnaires were used with surgeons after finishing their training by postal, and interviewing was conducted by telephone (randomly selected).

•Study mainly focused on 1) percentage of participation of surgical residents during doing their researches with the mentors 2) percentage of alumni who would like to continue research works after training 3) publication after finishing the projects 4) problems and obstacles during the researches projects included comment for curriculum improvement.

RESULT (1)

•Total number of graduated residents is 488 persons and only 55 questionnaires were collected with the response rate of 11%.

•Mean age of surgeons in this study is 34 years (SD = 3.4) and 91% were male.

•Percentage of retrospective study is 75% and prospective study represented 25%.

• 98% of them had performed their researches in training as their first projects.

Table 1 Percentage of participation of surgical residents in the research work.

RESULT (2)

Fig 1 Ability to conduct their own researches after graduation.

RESULT (3)

Fig 2 Percentage of residents who believed that their research experience during training will help them for surgical works after graduation.

RESULT (4)

Table 2 Mentioned three great obstacles in their surgical researches.

RESULT (5)

• Forty-five percent (25 from 55 researches) were published. Thirty two percent (8 out of 25) were published in the international journals.

•Although research projects are quite new to general surgical residents in Thailand, the attitude of surgeon to researches after completion of their training is strongly positive. Some of the feedback from this study can be helpful in curriculum development in the near future.

In-training research project during residency training is very useful and necessary which should be used in any surgical training program.

This study was funded by the Royal College of Surgeon of Thailand.