Video-Based Coaching as an Educational Platform for Urological Residency Training: A Pilot Study

Surgical experience requires skills traditionally taught through real-time operating room education and a variety of supplemental educational strategies. Video-based coaching is a modality that may offer potential advantages of immediate, direct and targeted feedback. The objective of this study was to demonstrate and evaluate the utility and educational value of video-based coaching in urology by conducting a qualitative analysis with a coding schema.

Residents and attendings were recorded operating during randomly selected cases in the operating room. Video-based coaching sessions were held during urology grand rounds and required residents to describe a selected portion of the operating room video and attendings to provide teaching points. Audio recordings from the operating room and video-based coaching sessions were reviewed by 2 independent coders. A coding scale classifying surgical educational goals into 5 categories (information, operative technique, questioning, response to resident interaction and unrelated commenting) was used to identify the interactions and was adjusted for time.

Four urological cases were selected for recording. In the video-based coaching sessions compared to the operating room, attendings made more teaching points per hour, provided more information to residents (mean teaching points 7.7 for video-based coaching vs 2.9 for operating room, p <0.005), emphasized operative skills and technique (mean teaching points 10.5 for video-based coaching vs 4.1 for operating room, p <0.005), and were more likely to ask open-ended discussion leading questions (mean teaching points 28.5 for video-based coaching vs 4.4 for operating room, p <0.05).

Video-based coaching delivered in short time frames offers an easily implementable additional learning opportunity for resident education to further enhance skills learned in the urological operating room.