Introduction:

The challenges of this century in medical education are flexible curricula, integrators of increasing complexity, centered on the students and their learning. In surgery teaching, the student must acquire the necessary competences for the diagnosis, resolution and/or origin of the surgical pathology.

Objective:

To describe the didactic elements of the teaching of surgery in the medical degree course of a private university.

Method:

Qualitative study, based on the Grounded Theory of Strauss and Corbín13. Six lecturers of the medical degree course who were selected according to theoretical sampling took part in the study. The lecturers were interviewed individually after signing an informed consent form. Semi-structured interviews were designed by the researchers. The analysis plan was created from the constant comparison method up to the open coding level, using Atlas-ti 7.5.2.

Results:

A total of 851 live codes were obtained, which helped to understand the general themes that were obtained from the semi-structured interviews. In this way, the teaching elements of undergraduate surgery teaching emerged as 3 categories: Progression of learning, associated with the development of linear and recursive clinical reasoning, teaching methodologies of the surgical discipline as the simulation, and the evaluation of the methodologies used.

Discussion:

It has been possible to characterise the different aspects of the didactics of surgery. The present study shows an initial approach to the didactics of undergraduate surgery in a private university in Chile. In this way, this study could serve as a basis for future lines of work in both the qualitative and quantitative areas of the teaching-learning process of undergraduate surgery, specifically in areas, such as clinical reasoning and simulation.