[Rotating physician in CHIR-Net. Evaluation of the curriculum]

Conduction of and participation in clinical trials is a major challenge for surgical departments especially as job performance in hospitals has increased immensely during the last few years due to economic aspects. Only 11.7 % of published clinical studies are randomized controlled trials. As more and more treatment procedures in medicine have an evidence-based design the aim must be to present randomized controlled trials with an evidence level 1 for an increasing number of surgical therapies. Since 2006 the German National Surgical Trial Network (CHIR-Net) has been established and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in order to promote the realization of clinical trials in surgery. Thus the basis for the execution of high quality clinical studies in surgery has been extended further. In the individual CHIR-Net centers clinical trials are planned, organized and supervised which requires extensive knowledge of prevalent international standards. Teaching them to rotating physicians is one of the tasks of CHIR-Net. Therefore, a special curriculum for physicians has been developed which is evaluated in this study.

From December 2010 to March 2011 an online survey of physicians who had previously rotated in the CHIR-Net was conducted, starting from the Surgical Regional Center (CRZ) Witten-Herdecke/Cologne. A total of 19 partly open and partly closed questions concerning the person, training, duration of the rotation, the funding applied for and the generated scientific output were surveyed. In addition, the curriculum for physicians and rotation time was checked by means of 17 questions in an evaluation matrix.

In this article the results of the rotating physician evaluation are presented. The satisfaction of physicians with the training during the rotation is presented as well as an analysis of how many of the submitted publications were directly supported by CHIR-Net. It was also evaluated how many rotating physicians requested funding and what the type of funding was.

With the rotating physician model of CHIR-Net a working concept for the training of surgeons in clinical research and the realization of randomized surgical trials was established as a viable solution for the difficult situation of clinical research in the surgical disciplines with the double burden of research and clinical practice.