USA vs. UK: ASGBI Ep. 9 - The Anatomy of Promoting Surgical Quality: Structure, Process, and Outcomes

Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast

Education, Science, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Surgical quality is a term that is often thrown around in surgical practice. We have multiple quality improvement projects, metrics and benchmarks that motivate us to do better, and of course the ever expanding patient reviews to possibly “reflect” the type of surgical care provided. But what does quality actually mean? What metrics can we use to understand the type of care being provided by ourselves, our colleagues, and the health system at large.

Today, we delve into these questions to understand how quality is currently understood within surgery and how we hope it to evolve in the future. Joining BTK fellow Agnes Premkumar and ASGBI hosts Jared Wohlgemut and Gita Lingam are two fantastic guests - Dr. Mark Cheetham, joining us from the UK, has deep experience in national audits and system-level quality improvement. Dr. Cheetham is a colorectal surgeon and the National Clinical Lead for General Surgery at the Getting it Right First Time Programme in NHS England, or GIRFT. Dr. Alexander Perez is representing the US; he is a board-certified general surgeon and minimally invasive surgeon at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center. He has worked extensively with institutional quality programs and is the current assistant Dean for patient safety, simulation, and process improvement at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Resources:

Institute for Healthcare Improvement: https://www.ihi.org/library/tools/quality-improvement-essentials-toolkit
NSQIP: https://www.facs.org/quality-programs/data-and-registries/acs-nsqip/
Getting it right first time (UK): https://gettingitrightfirsttime.co.uk/

***Fellowship Application Link: https://forms.gle/QSUrR2GWHDZ1MmWC6

Transcript

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0:00.0	Behind the Night, the Surgery Podcast, relevant and engaging content, to join the Behind the Knife team as a surgical education fellow.
0:28.9	We're looking for enterprising surgical residents to take the bull by the horns and build something new and exciting.
0:35.6	Fellows will benefit from ample support from the Behind the Knife team,
0:39.0	including the use of our digital education platform,
0:41.8	and access to all of our resources like illustrators,
0:45.0	video editing, AI tools, social media, and more.
0:48.7	Get your name out there and build your CV by being part of the number one
0:52.3	surgery education platform in the world.
0:55.5	We're offering a two-year fellowship starting July 26 and ending in June 28.
1:01.4	Only residents beginning their two-year academic development time will be considered.
1:05.9	Check out the show notes for more information, including the application link.
1:09.4	All applications are due on April 20th. Again, All applications are due on April 20th. Again,
1:13.1	all applications are due by April 20th. Now, get out there and dominate the day.
1:20.7	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Behind the Knife. We're back with another installment of our
1:24.7	BTK and ASGB collaborative series. My name is Agnes Premkmore. I'm one of the Behind the Knife Education Fellows, and I'm a general surgery resident who's representing the U.S. side, along with our UK-based co-host, Jared Volggement and Gita Lingham. Hi, I'm Gita Lingam. I'm a surgical resident based in the UK and the vice president of the Moynihan Academy. It's great to be back here again.
1:45.7	Hi, I'm Jared Volgamut, a surgical resident based in the UK, and the president of the
1:50.9	Moinian Academy, which is the resident group of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland.
1:56.1	Awesome. So today we're tackling a word that gets thrown around constantly in surgery, quality.
2:00.9	It's on dashboards tied to reimbursement, discussed in M&M, and increasingly being posted online.
2:07.1	And yet, when we say quality in healthcare, we're often not talking about the same thing.
2:11.3	Is it outcomes, processes, patient experience, safety culture, or just who has the lowest complication rate?
2:18.3	To help us unpack this, we're joined by two fantastic guests.
	...

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