Video Coaching: A National Survey of Surgical Residency Program Directors

Video coaching has been demonstrated to improve resident and attending skills and is overwhelmingly well received by the participants. However, misperceptions about its utility among those who do not use video coaching may be a barrier to widespread implementation.

Cross-sectional web-based survey SETTING: National survey PARTICIPANTS: Surgical program director members of the Association of Program Directors of Surgery STUDY DESIGN: The survey was developed via a deductive approach after a literature review and was piloted with surgical attendings and residents. All Likert scale were averaged and comparisons between groups was performed via independent t-tests.

There were 52 responses from PDs. 27/52(51.9%) PDs reported their program supported video coaching of residents. PDs from residences with video coaching programs were more likely to believe that video coaching was useful in identifying their own strengths and weakness (p = 0.005), was a useful adjunct for resident feedback (p = 0.024), and a personal library of video recordings would be helpful (p = 0.015) when compared to PDs from residencies without video coaching. Programs without video coaching were more likely to believe barriers to implementation included it being ineffective (p = 0.024) and that the technology was unavailable (p = 0.006). Over 50% of respondents from both groups believed expense, difficulty with set up, time required, and patient privacy were "Very" or "Extremely" likely to be barriers to implementation.

This is the first national survey of PDs regarding the use of video coaching. Residency programs without video coaching may underestimate the utility of video coaching in training surgical residents.