Educational Study of Multimedia in Surgical Skills Training in Colorectal Surgery

Summary

To practice independently surgeons require competency in surgical skills, encompassing a combination of technical and non-technical skills. Cognitive skills, aspects of non-technical skills, represent an integral component of surgical competency. Cognitive skills comprise factual knowledge and decision-making.

Changing work patterns in the United Kingdom, as specified by the European Working Time Directive (EWTD), have had a profound impact on the delivery of surgical skills training. Surgical trainees are now increasingly removed from normal working hours in which the majority of traditional operative training and experience is gained, leading to a net reduction in trainees' operative exposure. This reduction in operative experience means that surgical competence can no longer be assured on the basis of experience alone.

Although there is no educational technology that can replace the craft apprenticeship required to train a competent surgeon, reduction in training hours has led to rapid development of educational tools to augment surgical skills training outside the operating room environment. These tools tend to concentrate on technical skills performance without emphasis on cognitive skills.

Trainees in today's era have grown up in a multimedia environment; multimedia is media that uses a combination of text, voiceover, animation and video. Multimedia is an underdeveloped educational resource that can supplement cognitive skills training in operative surgery.

The purpose of this study was to design and develop an online multimedia educational tool in a common colorectal surgery procedure ("Anterior Resection") and determine the effectiveness of this tool in teaching and assessment of cognitive skills.

Study hypothesis: Multimedia learning is equivalent to conventional teaching "Study Day" in improving scores in cognitive surgical skills.

Conditions

• Focus of Study: Cognitive Surgical Skill Acquisition

Interventions

OTHER

Multimedia group

Participants are provided with unrestricted access to the online multimedia educational tools for self-directed study (during the study period)

OTHER

Study Day Group

Participants in the control arm of the study attend a conventional teaching "Study Day" involving a series of lectures on Open and Laparoscopic Anterior Resection

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Ethicon Endo-Surgery

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• HCA International Limited

  collaborator OTHER

• Digimed

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• University of Sheffield

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Umar Shariff, MBChB, MRCS · University of Sheffield

• Saba Balasubramanian, PhD, FRCS · University of Sheffield

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2011-10-31

Primary Completion

2011-12-31

Completion

2012-01-31

Countries

• United Kingdom

Study Locations