Previously submitted to: JMIR Research Protocols (no longer under consideration since Apr 27, 2020)
Date Submitted: Jan 22, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Cadaveric simulation vs standard training for postgraduate trauma & orthopaedic surgical trainees: protocol for the CAD:TRAUMA study multi-centre randomised controlled educational trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
The quantity and quality of surgical training in the UK has been negatively affected by reduced working hours and NHS financial pressures. Traditionally surgical training has occurred by the master-apprentice model involving a process of graduated responsibility, but a modern alternative is to use simulation for the early stages of training. It is not known if simulation training for junior trainees can safeguard patients and improve clinical outcomes. This paper details the protocol for a multicentre randomised controlled educational trial of a cadaveric simulation training intervention versus standard training for junior postgraduate orthopaedic surgeons-in-training.
Objective:
To assess the impact of cadaveric simulation training on patient outcomes following three common orthopaedic operations
Methods:
We will recruit postgraduate orthopaedic surgeons-in-training in the first three years (of eight) of the specialist training programme. Participants will be block randomised and allocated to either cadaveric simulation or standard ‘on-the-job’ training, learning three common orthopaedic procedures, each of which is a sub-study within the trial. The procedures are 1) Dynamic Hip Screw(DHS), 2) hemiarthroplasty and 3) ankle fracture fixation. These procedures have been selected as they are very common procedures which are routinely performed by junior surgeons-in-training. A pragmatic approach to sample size is taken in lieu of a formal power calculation as this is novel exploratory work with no a priori estimate of effect size to reference. The primary outcome measure is the technical success of the surgery performed on patients by the participating surgeons-in-training during the follow-up period for the three sub-study procedures, as measured by the implant position on the post-operative radiograph. The secondary outcome measures are procedure time, post-operative complication rate and patient health state at 4 months post-operation (EQ-5D – substudies 1 and 2 only).
Results:
Not applicable - this is a trial protocol.
Conclusions:
The results of this trial will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and will inform educational and clinical practice. Clinical Trial: ISRCTN20431944; Pre-results
Citation
The author of this paper has made a PDF available, but requires the user to login, or create an account.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.