The Australia New Zealand Microsurgical Skills Course - are we providing a high quality educational programme?

The three-day Australia New Zealand Microsurgical Skills Course (ANZMSC) is the first ophthalmic microsurgical skills course in the Southern Hemisphere that has been made mandatory by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO) for first year ophthalmology trainees. This study aimed to evaluate the educational value of the course and its cost-effectiveness.

Data was collected from the University of Sydney Student Evaluation Forms filled out by all 227 students of the twelve microsurgical skills courses since its commencement in 2018. Evaluations of different course components were compared with descriptive statistics and Mann-Whitney non-parametric testing. Thematic analysis of open-ended questions was done.

Most participants felt the course material was valuable for their learning (64.3% strongly agreed, 30.8% agreed). All learning stations ranked highly amongst participants. The most valuable learning experience was suturing on pig eyes, and the least was suturing on surgical skills boards (p < 0.01). Participants described the course as having great educational value for a relatively low cost. They appreciated practising oculoplastic procedures on cadavers, and spending time with the microscope doing corneal suturing. Suggestions to improve the course included more video demonstrations of procedures and replacing skills boards with pig eyelid or skin.

The microsurgical skills course has been appraised by positive feedback from participants, with few areas of suggested improvement to the learning materials. Future directions include objective validation studies demonstrating the change in accuracy and speed of students' corneal suturing, and rates of complications of phacoemulsification before and after the mandating of this course. This would allow a more comprehensive evaluation of the course including sustained teaching efficacy and cost-analysis.