Behind the knife, the Surgery Podcast, where we take a behind the scenes intimate look at surgery

from leaders in the field. Welcome to another episode of Behind the Knive. Today our guest is Dr. John Potts the

third. He is the current vice president for surgical accreditation at the ACGME.

He is an adjunct professor of surgery at the

University of Texas Houston where he was the program director for 21 years and the

vice chair of education for 17. He has held leadership roles in all of the surgical accrediting institutions and his CV

certainly speaks for itself with regards to his dedication for surgical education.

Dr. Pots, thank you for being with us today on Behind the Knife.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for asking me.

I wonder if we could just start off by, you know, just tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from,

you know, why you decided to go into surgical training and

specifically what led you to spend so much of your career focused on surgical education.

Sure, well, I actually grew up in a tiny town in Oklahoma

about a thousand people. Went to high school in a slightly larger city of Stillwater, about 20,000 probably at the time.

I began thinking about medicine, actually when I had an operation on my wrist that was the result of a football injury,

and it turns out that my grandmother had always wanted my father to be a surgeon or to be a physician as well.

And so those two kind of blended together and I started down the path of pursuing a medical degree. I did it in a strange way in that I majored in

history but that's that's another story.

Anyway, I ended up in medical school at the University of Oklahoma.

And the story of going into surgeries, one that I've told many

times to medical students. Turns out I had six or eight friends or fraternity brothers, others who were a year or two or three

ahead of me in medical school.

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