Video education in open trauma: a program for developing trauma surgical skills

Trauma surgery is characterized by high-acuity, low-frequency events. While trauma remains a leading cause of death and disability worldwide, surgical residents experience reduced trauma operative volumes during training. This paper highlights an important innovation for improvement of trauma surgery training: use of camera systems to record high fidelity video footage of open trauma cases.

This paper describes the systematic approach of integrating video camera recording of open trauma surgical cases at the Sotero del Rio Hospital in Santiago, Chile. Recording devices include both hand-held and head-mounted action cameras. We describe surgical team roles and responsibilities as well as workflow for patient consent, maintenance and management of recording equipment, and video storage and editing.

Our system of open trauma video recording has resulted in the largest video repository of emergent, high-fidelity trauma cases. Our video library contains over 1000 hours of video featuring over 250 independent operations and a broad variety of trauma cases.

Successful implementation of an open trauma video recording program requires clearly stated roles and responsibilities, a shift in work culture, and full integration of video recording into a trauma system's existing workflow. Use of the appropriate handheld and head-mounted cameras offers the opportunity to seamlessly collect high quality video footage with minimal impact to the operating team. A large and diverse open trauma video repository allows surgical trainees to review novel cases, attending surgeons to review previous cases, and overall improvement of educational conferences and didactics. Surgical trauma video recording and postoperative review represents a viable, inexpensive, and highly transportable solution to the recent reductions in overall trauma caseloads for surgical trainees across the globe.