The RESC serves as both a final action and an advisory committee, and reports its actions and recommendations to the AOA Program and Trainee Review Committee (PTRC) and to the AOA Council on Postdoctoral Training (COPT). The committee is composed of members appointed by the ACOS Board of Governors. Members serving on this committee are appointed for a three year term and are limited to serving three consecutive terms. There is a chair and a vice chair designated for the committee. The committee must include a member of the American Osteopathic Board of Surgery, a member of the AOA COPT, and a representative of each ACOS surgical discipline.

The AOA Bureau of Osteopathic Education is recognized by federal and state authorities as the accrediting agency for osteopathic medical education in the United States. Residency training is approved by the AOA through the COPT, a component of the Bureau of Osteopathic Education. The ACOS RESC serves as an advisory body to the AOA's PTRC for individual training and training programs for the specialties of general, general vascular, neurological, plastic and reconstructive, thoracic cardiovascular, surgical critical care, and urological surgery. The RESC has two primary functions: to develop standards which surgical training programs and residents must meet to be approved, and to review and make recommendations to the AOA to assure that residency programs and individual physicians seeking AOA approval have met the training standards. By establishing standards that must be met, AOA and ACOS achieve their major purpose of assuring that programs are of acceptable quality and individuals have been adequately trained.

The approval process for surgical residency training and programs is a public trust and its purposes are many. These include assuring:

• students who are selecting among training programs that the osteopathic programs have the necessary scope and meet AOA and ACOS standards established for education and training in surgery;
• residents in training programs, who are the consumers of the educational process, that they are receiving education and training that is of high quality;
• trainers, other educational faculty and staff, who are jointly responsible for the educational process, that the enterprise in which they are engaged is of high quality;
• governing boards and administrators of training institutions, that their sponsored programs meet acceptable national standards;
• certifying boards, that the standards they require are being met by individual programs;
• funding agencies, that the educational programs meet national standards and merit support, and
• the public, that residents are provided education and training of high quality in programs that are well supervised by competent teaching staffs.