New comprehensive surgical curriculum of pre-graduate surgical education

INTRODUCTION: Surgical education has become one of the most important directions in modern surgery evolution. To meet growing need for appropriate training in laparoscopic and, even more importantly, classic surgical skills, a curriculum involving contemporary tuition methods is needed. Advanced, structuralised training, which includes advanced technologies like virtual reality training, video coaching and motivative aspects of competition, seems to be important for an adequate education programme. MATERIAL AND METHODS: In academic years 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 the Department of General, Endocrine and Transplant Surgery of the Medical University of Gdansk together with the Pomeranian Foundation for Progress in Surgery organized 4480 h of training in that area of classic (2744) and laparoscopic (1736) skills. Both groups were involved in the programme of training in which the two most important aspects were reliable evaluation of the results and effective motivation to work. Skill evaluation at different stages of the programme were based on completion time and quality measurements. Apart from that, at the end of the course, the participants completed a questionnaire on their subjective perspective on this innovative curriculum, the quality and stability of the skills they obtained. RESULTS: In both arms of the programme (laparoscopic and classic) a statistically significant improvement was obtained as early as after the second and third sessions in half of the exercises. The acquired skills were stable over time, as proved by the plateau of completion time achieved in 11 out of 12 exercises. The results of the post-training questionnaire revealed that the participants were very satisfied with the structuralised form of training and appreciated the motivational role of competition. CONCLUSIONS: Contemporary surgical training should be organized as a systematic, well-evaluated and goal-oriented programme similar to the one proposed by our team. The use of contemporary training aids should be utilized in training of every surgical skill, not only laparoscopy. This form of training, associated with the component of competition, enables good and stable results to be achieved, as well as high satisfaction of trainees.