Teaching and assessing endoscopic sinus surgery skills on a validated low-cost task trainer

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Surgical Simulation
• Otolaryngology

Background:

• Endoscopic sinus surgery (ESS) requires specialized skills.
• Objective assessment of surgical competency is crucial for patient safety.
• Novel training methods are needed to improve surgical education.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess a low-cost task trainer for teaching basic ESS skills.
• To evaluate the trainer as an Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills (OSATS) tool.
• To determine procedural competency in novice surgeons.

Main Methods:

• Prospective blinded study involving 52 medical students with no prior ESS experience.
• Training utilized a validated low-cost task trainer with expert and peer instruction.
• Pre- and post-training video assessments were performed using checklists and global rating scales by blinded otolaryngologists.

Main Results:

• Significant improvement in student performance on all checklist items and global ratings post-training (P < .001).
• High interrater reliability and internal consistency of the assessment tool were confirmed.
• The task trainer proved effective in skill acquisition and assessment.

Conclusions:

• The sinus surgery task trainer is an effective tool for teaching and evaluating basic ESS skills in novice surgeons.
• Repeated practice on the trainer leads to significant performance improvements.
• The trainer-based OSATS can reliably measure ESS ability and determine competency outside the operating room.