Defining core information for the training and continuing education of surgical oncologists.

Keeping abreast of the evolving field of surgical oncology is a challenge to all surgeons. One of the primary missions of the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) is to educate fellows-in-training, members of the Society, and the broader community of surgeons who treat cancer. The Society is pleased to provide these communities with a new educational tool: Surgical Oncology: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. This is an annotated bibliography of published literature, recent abstracts, and major clinical trials, organized by disease site. The bibliography is available without charge through the SSO Web site: www.surgonc.org. This project is an outgrowth of a review of the educational needs of SSO-approved training programs. This review led to the development of a standardized training curriculum and the cessation of the annual in-training examination. The bibliography project was instituted to provide substantive content to the curriculum and to enhance the didactic educational component of the training programs. As the project developed, it became clear that this bibliography would also be useful for enhancing training in general surgery and other oncology disciplines and for providing continuing education to surgical oncologists and general surgeons. As implied by the title, the bibliography provides a review of published literature (yesterday), current abstracts (today), and current and future clinical trials (tomorrow) for each disease site. We believe that the latter two components are exceedingly important because trainees are frequently unable to attend all of the major annual oncology meetings and generally are not well informed about ongoing cooperative group and multicenter trials. As a result, when they finish fellowship training, individual trainees may not have their “radar screens” optimally loaded with current and future issues for each disease site. One of our goals, therefore, was to provide useful information on important current abstracts and recently completed, ongoing, and planned clinical trials. The monograph is organized by disease site (breast, melanoma, and so on). We invited a Society member to compile the bibliography for each disease site and to write brief annotations highlighting the relevance of and the issues surrounding the cited publications. The charge to each disease-site editor was to provide a brief overview of the disease site, including critical historical papers, and to highlight areas of controversy and rapidly changing therapeutic approach. The intent was to steer readers to the major issues but not necessarily to provide a comprehensive reference list for each disease site. The individual disease-site sections were then reviewed for content and scope by other experts for that disease site. Therefore, each chapter reflects input from a spectrum of clinicians with focused interest in the field and includes an annotated bibliography of published references; a summary of important papers presented at the 2000 annual meetings of the SSO, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and/or other subspecialty societies; and a listing of and comments on relevant ongoing and planned clinical trials. The monograph has been distributed in print form to all trainees in SSO-approved programs. However, to make it more accessible to other trainees and to practicing physicians, the Society has made the monograph available—free of charge—over its Web site (www.surgonc.org). The Web version of the project was implemented with the assistance of Dr. Dido Franceschi and includes the following functions: