Our students participate in a detailed and mandatory for all hands-on training regimen that includes both basic as well as advanced minimally invasive skills (object manipulation, spatial orientation, tissue and plane dissection, suturing, knot-tying etc.), as well as practice on simboxes, surgical simulators, dry labs, as well as in the operating theatre, by participating in actual surgical procedures. The students are also mandatorily trained on DaVinci Xi robotic system training consoles.
During their two-year course, our students are monitored on a regular basis and their performance is recorded and analyzed by our instructors, in order to perform targeted, personalized corrections to every student individually, based on their own abilities and personal particularities during their technical training. The result of this exceptionally detailed and meticulous approach is the proved, based on actual metrics improvement for 100% of the student corps: during the first two-year course of the programme (2019 – 2021), every single student exhibited consistently improved scores on the evaluation of their laparoendoscopic and robotic skills.
As an example we report on the evaluation of our students with regards to their robotic skills: all students were scored on 14 exercises of the DaVinci™ Skill Simulator™ by Intuitive over the two years of their course. The scoring was done in an automatic manner by the training and simulation system, with no human intervention, keeping intact the factors pertaining to every individual student and maintaining the same objectives in every training session. The statistical analysis of the results showed a statistically highly significant improvementboth for all individual exercises (p ranging from 0.053 to <0.0001, score improvement 11.29% – 58.54%), as well as in the general performance score for every single student (p < 0.0001, mean score improvement by 40.89%, CI 95% 36.74% – 45.04%).
