Pre-education Enhances the Success of Manual Training for Orthopedic Surgery Residents

Surgical skill training is difficult due to limited resources and the associated risks in the clinical setting. There have been many studies that have looked at optimizing resident skill techniques out of the operating room to optimize intraoperative teaching. Specifically, as seen in spine surgery performing a laminectomy with a high-speed drill is difficult and requires many hours of training and guidance before a resident can feel comfortable to adequately complete the laminectomy with minimal risk of adverse effects.

The objective of this study is to assess if pre-education of residents prior to using the high-speed drill will significantly increase their comfort level, as well as increase the success of laminectomy.

This was done by a prospective cohort study in evaluating 20 orthopedic surgical residents via the objective structured assessment of technical skills and global rating scale.

Results showed that residents who had pre-education were in fact more successful in completing the laminectomy with the high-speed drill.

Pre-education, whether via a didactic or simulator-based model are both beneficial to resident's knowledge and surgical skill attainment however the simulator based model did not deem the group more successful in completing the laminectomy with the high-speed drill. Certain technical skills still require unreplaceable hands-on practice to become proficient.