Hopkins Assessment of Surgical Competency (HASC)
Chou et al. developed the Hopkins Assessment of Surgical Competency (HASC), which contains two assessment scales, General Surgical Skills and Case Specific Surgical Skills, to measure trainee surgical competency in gynaecologic surgery.18. With the exception of oncology cases, all levels of surgical complexity were covered, from hysterectomy to dilation of cervix to urogynaecology.
The assessment form contains seven items from OSATS14and four from an American Council on Resident Education in Obstetrics and Gynecology toolbox. Another four items were included from a rating system already in use at Chou et al-s’ institution. After modifying all the items using factor analysis, the results were divided into two six-item scales, a case-specific one and a general surgical one, each item scored using a five-point Likert scale. Sixteen faculty physicians evaluated 16 trainees after the trainees had performed surgery. The trainees also performed self-evaluation.
Their study analysed 362 cases, and the authors find internal validity and reliability, demonstrated by high Cronbach’s alpha (>.80) and high Pearson correlation coefficients (>0.80) for both scales. Discriminant validity was also significant (p<0.001) for both scales when comparing the performance of trainees in their second and fourth year of training.