Enriching operating room based student learning experience: exploration of factors and development of curricular guidelines

BACKGROUND: Operating Room (OR) is a high-pressure setting where multiple complex surgical, educational, and administrative facets interplay. Contrary to resident training, the dynamics of undergraduate medical students’ learning process is highly demanding, opportunistic, unstandardized, and suboptimal owing to many reasons. Upon reviewing the existing published literature regarding the medical students’ experience in the OR setting, it was clear that this field is still to date, unstructured, and ambiguous, with many grey areas that need to be worked on. To achieve an optimized and enhanced theatre experience, it is of immense importance to recognize the recurrent themes affecting medical students within this setting and deduce ways to overcome these challenges. This study explores and prioritizes factors influencing OR-based student learning quality and develops guidelines for structured clinical encounters within the OR setting. METHODS: The study involved an extensive literature review and thematic analysis to generate themes and subthemes, which were subjected to a modified Delphi technique where students and teachers participated to identify, debate, and produce a consensus on the relative value of these factors. Finally, expert-validated guidelines were developed for OR curricular designs. RESULTS: Operating theater-based student learning is multifactorial. Structured learning through optimized course planning, content selection, assessment, and administration are decisive in determining the quality of OR learning experience. The teacher’s interest, attitude, and students’ desire and preparedness to learn play a central role in OR-based student learning, suggesting an enhanced need for adequate faculty training. Similarly, emotional, socio-environmental, and organizational factors can influence students’ learning in a significant way. A new model for undergraduate student learning in OR has been proposed based on these factors and the stakeholders’ interplay. In this model, the teacher’s role is responsible despite OR learning being student- led. Guidelines for the OR curricular designs have been developed. CONCLUSION: Structured learning process within the OR setting can lead to optimized lesson planning, content selection, assessment, and administration for a more meaningful and enriched OR learning experience. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03793-x.