General Surgery Typing Practice

Choosing General Surgery in the Specialty menu mixes a surgical vocabulary pack into the general medical stream. You type what a general surgery team writes: op notes for common cases, acute abdomen consults, daily post-op notes and discharge instructions, in spelled-out or shorthand form.

Open the trainer with the General Surgery pack

Op note dictation Post-op rounds Acute abdomen consult

Preset links open the trainer with those settings already applied; you can change them afterward.

What general surgery notes are made of

Typing in general surgery splits between the op note and the daily post-op note. Op notes follow a fixed header (pre- and postoperative diagnosis, procedure, anesthesia, blood loss, drains, specimens, implants, wound class, findings) and then a step-by-step narrative that names trocar sizes, stapler loads, suture types and mesh dimensions. Post-op notes repeat the same checks every day: postoperative day, flatus and bowel movements, diet stage, drain output and color, incision appearance, voiding, walking and VTE prophylaxis.

Consults for the acute abdomen are short and rest on exam findings such as guarding, rebound and hernia reducibility, plus the CT read and a clear operative or nonoperative plan. Grades such as Tokyo, Hinchey, AAST and Clavien-Dindo appear in assessments and handoffs, and abbreviations like s/p, POD, lap chole, ex-lap, LOA and IOC come up in almost every note.

What the general surgery pack adds

The pack has 1,033 new items and emphasizes about 160 general items. The general corpus already had a basic op-note skeleton, so most of the roughly 560 new note lines are case-specific: cholecystectomy, appendectomy, inguinal and ventral hernia, colectomy and ostomy creation, laparotomy, bariatric cases, and breast, thyroid and anorectal surgery, plus post-op, consult, trauma survey and discharge lines:

• A 12 mm Hasson trocar placed using an open technique and secured with stay sutures
• End-to-end colorectal anastomosis created with a 29 mm circular stapler
• Implants: 15 by 15 cm lightweight polypropylene mesh
• Skin closed with 4-0 Monocryl subcuticular sutures and skin glue
• Postoperative day 4 status post exploratory laparotomy and small bowel resection
• Acute calculous cholecystitis, Tokyo grade I, symptoms for less than 72 hours

With Abbreviations on, the fifth line becomes POD 4 s/p ex-lap, SBR. About 75 read lines cover CT, right upper quadrant ultrasound, HIDA, leak studies, FAST and surgical pathology. Single terms add complications (anastomotic leak, fascial dehiscence, chyle leak), operative anatomy such as the cystic plate and Cooper ligament, and surgical scores. Dosing strings cover about 75 drugs, focused on prophylactic antibiotics, multimodal analgesia, VTE prophylaxis and post-thyroidectomy calcium, for example enoxaparin 30 mg subcutaneously q12h for trauma VTE prophylaxis.

How to practice

For op-note dictation, turn on Note Phrases, Anatomy and Procedures, leave Abbreviations off and use Block, which halts the stream at each error. Op notes are usually written out in full, and suture names and sizes (0 Vicryl, 2-0 PDS, 4-0 Monocryl) mix digits, hyphens and capitals in a way that trips most typists. For post-op rounds, switch Abbreviations on, add Physiology & Labs, the generic drug chip and Symptoms & Signs, set the dosing slider around 40 and use Cascade. That stream reads like a stack of POD notes.

The chips filter the general corpus too, so a Note Phrases session gives general note lines alongside the surgical ones, with pack items at roughly half of the draws. Five to ten minutes on most days is enough to see the per-key heatmap change. Everything runs in the browser, without an account.