A new approach to the assessment and evaluation of technical skills

Surgical education has changed dramatically over the last 15 years as traditional “time served” approaches have given way to objective assessments of efficiency. These assessments are very resource intensive and require a greater level of training for the educators and evaluators. Furthermore they often do not provide timely, meaningful feedback to the trainees. To overcome these difficulties, the Surgical Skills Centre (SSC) at Mount Sinai Hospital is seeking to improve the efficiency of the assessment process and concurrently better integrate feedback into surgical education. As yet a comprehensive list of indicators that will assist with this are not available. The proposed project will collect traditional checklist assessment data, along with established measures of proficiency (e.g. motion tracking of movements) as a first step towards eventually developing a comprehensive, low cost training tool incorporating objective assessments and feedback. Focus will be on improving motion tracking techniques.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Alex Mihailidis

Student:

Neil Rittenhouse

Partner:

Mount Sinai Hospital

Discipline:

Kinesiology

Sector:

Life sciences

University:

University of Toronto