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The use of multiple prescription drugs, termed polypharmacy, has been found to be a significant risk factor for morbidity and mortality among the elderly and thus should be monitored vigilantly. This role-playing activity was created by medical students as part of a student-led, small-group, active-learning session focused on polypharmacy. Simulation role-play is grounded in a variety of educational theories, including experiential learning, reflective practice, and a constructivist view of learning. This activity stimulates group engagement with the material, reflective opportunities in the role of patient and/or provider, and shared development and discovery of the risks and complications of polypharmacy. It also explores interprofessional collaboration. The activity is broken into three rounds, and participants act as physicians, patients, or a pharmacist. In each round, patients must visit the physicians and get prescriptions, after which the pharmacist tells the patients of any side effects they may experience from their prescribed drug regimen. Each round, the rules change slightly, allowing the physicians and patients to share more information in an effort to reduce side effects through enhanced collaboration. The activity was implemented with 11 participants, which is the recommended number generally. Using this interactive role-play game, students engage with and explore the difficulties that patients, prescribers, and pharmacists encounter when keeping track of multiple medications. In addition, the exercise highlights the challenge of communication between providers in the care of patients with varying medical comorbidities and drug-drug interactions. A strength of this exercise is its applicability to a wide range of learners at various levels of training within an interprofessional educational context. The role-play mimics real-life patient experiences and health system issues.

General surgery residents' exposure to cardiothoracic (CT) surgery rotations has decreased, which may affect resident satisfaction. We surveyed general surgery graduates to assess the relationships among rotation satisfaction, CT disease exposure, rotation length, mentorship, and mistreatment.A survey assessing CT curriculum, exposure, mentorship, and satisfaction was forwarded to general surgery graduates from 17 residency programs. A Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used to assess statistical significance of ordinal level data. Statistical significance was defined as p0.05.This study was conducted at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, MI, a tertiary care center.The survey was sent to approximately 1300 graduates of general surgery residency programs who graduated between the years of 1999 to 2014. A total of 94 responses were completed and received.Receiving adequate exposure to CT procedures and disease management was significantly associated with higher satisfaction ratings for all procedures, particularly thoracotomy incisions (p0.001), empyemas and pleural effusions (p0.001), and lung cancer care (p0.001). The absence of mistreatment and good/very good mentorship were both positively associated with higher reported satisfaction (p = 0.018 and p0.001, respectively). Increased length of time on CT rotation was neither associated with improved levels of satisfaction nor with an improvement in the quality of mentorship.Rotation satisfaction is positively associated with procedure exposure, better mentorship, and the absence of mistreatment. Longer rotation length was not associated with satisfaction. Shorter rotations are not detrimental to training if they have focused clinical exposure and invested mentors to maximize resident satisfaction. These specific markers of rotation quality are useful in curricular design.