The Legacy of the Global Surgical Training Challenge Continues 04 Apr 2023 The end of the Global Surgical Training Challenge (GSTC) marks the beginning of a new chapter in global surgical training. With the announcement of the Grand Prize winner and Runner-up of this past January, our team is winding down the three-year-long initiative. The winning teams, ALL-SAFE and TFF, are identifying the next evolution of their training modules. The Challenge Works teams are tying up loose ends and transitioning the project to its funder. The Intuitive Foundation announced the launch of SELF: Surgical Education Learners Forum at the COSECSA Scientific Conference in December 2022, where the four GSTC finalist teams were showcased, allowing the surgical community in Africa an opportunity to see what the prize and new initiative is about. This new initiative is a follow-on from the success of the GSTC. What is SELF? “SELF will be an online platform where we will collect high quality surgical education material aimed at training practitioners in low and middle income countries,” says Dr Catherine Mohr, president of the Intuitive Foundation. One of the hallmarks of the material on the SELF platform is the ability for learners to self-assess their performance and monitor their progress, according to Dr Mohr. “Self-assessment is a component that hasn’t been in a lot of surgical education in the past,” she says. How does it work? The modules will contain elements seen in most traditional surgical skills education, such as didactic knowledge-based training. These set the context for the surgical skills, reviewing the clinical indications and situations in which the surgical procedure is appropriate. Some modules provide guidance for post-surgical care and follow-up in the clinic. The didactic training is followed by the acquisition of the psychomotor skills necessary to perform the procedure confidently and safely. Learners can follow detailed instructions to build a simulator with locally available materials, then be able to practice the skills. “The real innovation comes in the self administered assessment,” Dr Mohr says. “The modules, either through an online application or via the simulators, provide feedback. This allows learners to experience purposeful practice that corrects errors, playing the same role that a coach or a master teacher would be playing.” How does this change the game for surgical training? The SELF platform sets out to address the lack of trained surgical practitioners in many parts of the world. This is largely due to the limited ability to train them when they are dependent on master surgeons to act as mentors. “Traditional medical training is very apprenticeship based,” says Dr Mohr. “See one. Do one. Teach one. It’s very heavily dependent on the teacher being there. The result is that we’re very limited in the number of learners who can be trained at any one time, given the lack of available master surgeon educators.” SELF seeks to change the scale of this interaction entirely by allowing learners to teach themselves independent of any presence of a teacher. Many, many learners can be doing this all in parallel, without being limited by the number of available educators. SELF will include not only surgical skills training, but also other training for health care workers, such as biomedical technicians. The pilot, called SELF: Biomedical Training Program, provides learners with no-cost access to Medical Aid International’s biomedical training program, which includes a 13-unit self-administered online training course, device documentation library, high-quality tools, and a laptop. Call for partners SELF and Intuitive Foundation are actively seeking partners and learners to join the platform, either as innovators developing new modules or as institutional partners to conduct evaluations of the modules. “Traditional medical training trains people to excellence, but it does it so slowly we can’t meet all of the need that’s out there,” says Dr Mohr. “We need an alternate way to train many, many more people to clinical excellence and to meet this need, because it’s ultimately about the needs of the patients, where those patients are, how we get care to where they are.” To learn more, visit https://www.intuitive-foundation.org/self/.
