Trainee autonomy and surgical outcomes after emergency gastrointestinal surgery

Operative meaningful trainee autonomy is an essential component of surgical training. Reduced trainee autonomy is frequently attributed to patient safety concerns, but this has not been examined within Kenya. We aimed to assess whether meaningful trainee autonomy was associated with a change in patient outcomes.

We investigated whether meaningful trainee autonomy was associated with a change in severe postoperative complications and all-cause in-hospital mortality in a previously described cohort undergoing emergency gastrointestinal operations. Each operation was reviewed to determine the presence of meaningful autonomy, defined as "supervision only" from faculty. Comparisons were made between faculty-led cases and cases with meaningful trainee autonomy. Multilevel logistic regression models were created for the outcomes of mortality and complications with the exposure of meaningful trainee autonomy, accounting for fixed effects of the Africa Surgical Outcomes Study Risk Score and random effects of discharge diagnoses.

After excluding laparoscopy (N = 28) and missing data (N = 3), 451 operations were studied, and 343 (76.1%) had meaningful trainee autonomy. Faculty were more involved in operations with older age, cancer, prior complications, and higher risk scores. On unadjusted analysis, meaningful trainee autonomy was associated with mortality odds of 0.32 (95% confidence interval: 0.17-0.58) compared with faculty-led operations. Similarly, the odds of developing complications were 0.52 (95% confidence interval: 0.32-0.84) with meaningful trainee autonomy compared with faculty-led operations. When adjusting for Africa Surgical Outcomes Study Score and clustering discharge diagnoses, the odds of mortality (odds ratio 0.58; 95% confidence interval: 0.27-1.2) and complication (odds ratio 0.83; 95% confidence interval: 0.47-1.5) were not significant.

Our findings support that increasing trainee autonomy does not change patient outcomes in selected emergency gastrointestinal operations. Further, trainees and faculty appropriately discern patients at higher risk of complications and mortality, and the selective granting of trainee autonomy does not affect patient safety.