What were attrition rates in surgical residency programs 25 years ago?

Last month I blogged about the 20% attrition rate of general surgery resident over the last 25 years, and a recent paper presented at a national meeting that found after following the general surgery resident class of 2007, 20% had dropped out for one reason or another.

A reader who calls himself Artiger commented on that piece asking, “Is there any data on resident attrition prior to 1992? Just curious if this has been a problem for more than the past 25 years.”

I responded that I wasn’t aware of any such studies but I would try to find out.

Most of the few papers written about attrition back in the day focused on one residency program or one medical school’s graduates.

Until the middle of the 1990s, many surgical residency programs were pyramidal—that is, they took more categorical first-year residents than they had chief residency positions. For example, when I began my training in 1971, my program had 12 first-year residents, decreasing to 8 in the second-year and only 4 chiefs.