Teaching robotic surgery

Introduction

The adoption and implementation of new technologies in surgical practice are growing at an exponential rate. The evolution of techniques, devices, and surgical platforms has revolutionized the training experience. New approaches to surgical disease have resulted in a vastly different clinical and operative experience for the current trainees. The ever-changing surgical training landscape has been further challenged by pressure for faculty surgeons to be clinically and academically productive, often without including teaching as an academic activity. As such, effective approaches to training the current era of surgeons warrant a comparable evolution to ensure effectiveness.

Training surgical residents has changed significantly since Halsted established the modern era of surgical resident education at Johns Hopkins. Prior to this, surgical training initially comprised an apprenticeship model and focused on specific lessons related to technical skill sets or knowledge from one mentor. These traditional models of training have changed as a result of growing healthcare demands, duty hour restrictions, the introduction of simulation as a teaching modality, pressure for faculty to be more productive outside of teaching, and the development of standardized surgical expectations.

Although surgical trainees are still expected to acquire a thorough fund of knowledge related to the scientific basis of surgical disease, current residents are also expected to master new surgical technology that many of their senior faculty members are just learning. ^, The current system, developed in 1995, was initially implemented in cardiac, gynecologic, and urologic surgery and has since been adopted in general surgery. In 2017, more than 4400 hospitals utilized an Intuitive Surgical da Vinci robotic instrument, allowing for more than 870, 000 robotic operations to be completed annually. As new surgical modalities are introduced, we must create mandatory uniform educational models in order to graduate surgeons competent in the latest surgical advancements. ^,

Robotic surgical training for residents