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'You see?' Teaching and learning how to interpret visual cues during surgery
Alexandra C Cope1,2, Jeff Bezemer3, Roger Kneebone1
1Department of Surgery and Cancer, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK.
Medical Education
|October 24, 2015
Summary
Trainee surgeons learn visual interpretation through "co-construction," a collaborative process with trainers. This involves guided or authentic dialogue to identify surgical cues, enhancing learning in the operating room.
Area of Science:
- Medical Education
- Surgical Training
- Visual Perception
Background:
- Interpreting visual cues is critical in surgery, with perception errors often leading to poor outcomes.
- Understanding how surgical trainees develop visual judgment skills is limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore how surgical trainees learn to interpret visual cues within the operating room environment.
Main Methods:
- A multiple case study design involving postgraduate surgical trainees and trainers.
- Data collection included field notes and over 11 hours of integrated video/audio recordings from 12 surgical cases.
- Constant comparative methodology was employed to identify key themes in learning visual interpretation.
Main Results:
- Visual cue interpretation is a frequent aspect of trainer-trainee interactions, primarily achieved through co-construction.
- Co-construction involves collaborative dialogue to identify and name anatomical structures or pathology.
- Two forms of co-construction were observed: 'guided' (trainer-led) and 'authentic' (collaborative uncertainty), influenced by case difficulty and trainee seniority.
Conclusions:
- Learning visual cue interpretation in surgical training occurs significantly through co-construction.
- This study articulates co-construction in the visual domain, enabling the development of targeted pedagogical strategies.
- Findings are applicable to various medical specialties reliant on visual information for decision-making.
