Dr. Galen Perdikis: Leveling Up the Pyramid of Surgical Skill

In this Leveling Up episode of the PRS Global Open Deep Cuts Podcast, Dr. Galen Perdikis discusses the growth that Vanderbilt's plastic surgery department and residency program have experienced over the last decade, the importance of specialized service lines to achieve the best patient care as well as resident education, the benefits of advanced practice providers in creating institutional memory, how he has built cross-departmental teams at Vanderbilt, what he means by “team-based capitalism” and how this approach has created a strong sense of teamwork in his faculty. He also discusses the pyramid approach to developing surgical skill and the need for active learning to climb that pyramid, the highly structured and formal approach to resident evaluation that Vanderbilt has instituted, his controversial thoughts on competency based residency certification, how to give good feedback, his thoughts on the use of meshes in breast reconstruction, how he has improved his efficiency in DIEP flaps, why he likes exoscopes for microsurgery cases, why dog ears are the bane of his existence, and what exactly a Scouser is.

Read a classic PRS Global Open article by Dr. Perdikis and his colleagues, “Acellular Dermal Matrix Performance Compared with Latissimus Dorsi Myocutaneous Flap in Expander-Based Breast Reconstruction”: https://bit.ly/ADMvsLDMF_GOX 

Dr. Galen Perdikis is a Professor and the G Patrick Maxwell Endowed Chair of the department of Plastic Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and was previously the Professor and Chair of the Division of Plastic Surgery at the Mayo College of Medicine in Jacksonville Florida. He completed medical school at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He trained in both South Africa and England, he completed a general surgery residency and research fellowship at Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha Nebraska. He finished his training with a plastic surgery fellowship at Vanderbilt, where he has now returned for the last 8 years as Chair. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Plastic Surgery, President-Elect of the Southeastern Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, a member of the editorial board for the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, and a previous member of the Board of Governors for ASPS PlastyPAC. He is a visiting professor for ASPS this year.

Your host, Dr. Puru Nagarkar, is a board-certified plastic and hand surgeon, and Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

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