Jan 11, 2007 - technical skills during laparoscopic salpingectomy for ectopic ... in their career, where they appear to shorten training time on patients while ...
Correspondence
training for gynaecologists in training. This article clearly shows the improvement in movement efficiency, time to complete the procedure and blood loss after training with the simulator. Furthermore, the authors have also clearly demonstrated that the candidates most likely to derive benefit from this method of skills acquisition were the most inexperienced surgeons. These results are in complete agreement with our study of VR simulator training2 and add to the impetus towards the incorporation of VR simulator training into gynaecological training. In our study, we assessed the improvement derived from VR simulator training on before-training and after-training gynaecological surgical scores using live sheep. Our studies suggested that VR training led to improvements in the surgical skills of novices. The senior doctors who took part in our study demonstrated, as expected, better surgical skills when performing the initial surgical exercises on the sheep. Not surprisingly, their after-training scores on the sheep model showed no real improvement. In contrast, the novices who were not familiar with the gynaecological surgical procedures scored poorly on the before-training scores but showed significant improvement in their post-VR sheep exercise scores. Hence in agreement with the article published by Aggarwal et al.,1 training programmes involving the use of VR simulators appear to be of considerable value to those early in their career, where they appear to shorten training time on patients while increasing safety and improving effectiveness of the procedures undertaken, and therefore should be part of the general training of junior gynaecologists. A further important result of our study was the finding that a poor initial VR score was predictive of a poor final live surgical score. This raises the possibility of using a more developed programme to pick up trainees with difficulties in the area of surgical training, at the earliest possible stage of their training programme, and subject them to either intensive remedial work or encourage them to move to a nonsurgical part of the specialty. j
References 1 Aggarwal R, Tully A, Grantcharov T, Larsen CR, Miskry T, Farthing A, et al. Virtual reality simulation training can improve technical skills during laparoscopic salpingectomy for ectopic pregnancy. BJOG 2006;113: 1382–7. 2 Hart R, Doherty D, Karthigasu K, Garry R. The value of virtual-reality simulator training in the development of laparoscopic surgical skill. J Minim Invasive Gynecol 2006;13:126–33.
Virtual reality simulation training can improve technical skills during laparoscopic salpingectomy for ectopic pregnancy
Sir, We read with great interest the article by Aggarwal et al.1 demonstrating the benefit of virtual reality (VR) simulator
656
R Hart, K Karthigasu & R Garry UWA School of Women’s and Infants’ Health, University of Western Australia, King Edward Memorial Hospital, Perth, Western Australia, Australia Accepted 11 January 2007. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0528.2007.01298.x
ª 2007 The Authors Journal compilation ª RCOG 2007 BJOG An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
