Background: With increasing public awareness of and greater coverage for gender-confirming surgery by insurers, more transgender patients are likely to seek surgical transition. The degree to which plastic surgery and urology trainees are prepared to treat transgender patients is unknown. Objective: We assessed the number of hours dedicated to transgender-oriented education in plastic surgery and urology residencies, and the impact of program director (PD) attitudes on provision of such training. Methods: PDs of all Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education–accredited plastic surgery (91) and urology (128) programs were invited to participate. Surveys were completed between November 2015 and March 2016; responses were collected and analyzed. Results: In total, 154 PDs (70%) responded, and 145 (66%) completed the survey, reporting a yearly median of 1 didactic hour and 2 clinical hours of transgender content. Eighteen percent (13 of 71) of plastic surgery and 42% (31 of 74) of urology programs offered no didactic education, and 34% (24 of 71) and 30% (22 of 74) provided no clinical exposure, respectively. PDs of programs located in the southern United States were more likely to rate transgender education as unimportant or neutral (23 of 37 [62%] versus 39 of 105 [37%]; P = .017). PDs who rated transgender education as important provided more hours of didactic content (median, 1 versus 0.75 hours; P = .001) and clinical content (median, 5 versus 0 hours; P < .001). Conclusions: A substantial proportion of plastic surgery and urology residencies provide no education on transgender health topics, and those that do, provide variable content. PD attitudes toward transgender-specific education appear to influence provision of training.

With the passage of time, certain hand surgery procedures are anecdotally dubbed “workhorse” techniques. These are procedures that are extremely reliable and have repeatedly demonstrated good results. However, with time, paradigms undergo shifts, and this is as true for hand surgery as any other field. In this article, we will describe the use of three new “workhorse” flaps that we have found to have reliable results in complex hand reconstruction: the pedicled radial forearm fascia flap for dorsal hand reconstruction, the free anterolateral thigh flap for mangled hand reconstruction, and the medial femoral condyle vascularized bone graft for scaphoid fracture nonunion reconstruction.