Surgical simulation in emergency management and communication improves performance, confidence, and patient safety in medical students

Abstract

Introduction: This study aims to enhance the confidence and operational safety of 5th-year medical students in the operating room (OR), addressing their corona pandemic gap in surgical training. Methods: We augmented the surgical curriculum focusing on pre-, intra-, and post-operative skills, centered around a phantom operation as a pre-test-retest simulation. We measured confidence to assist in surgery on a 5-level Likert-scale and monitored surgical performance metrics (skin-to-skin time, blood loss, blood and volume transfusion, complications, fatal outcome). Half the cohort was explicitly video trained in hemostasis, while the other half in emergency communication. Factual knowledge gains were assessed with online questionnaires. The groups served as reciprocal controls, as confidence (communication group) and surgical performance (bleeding group) were compared. Results: Initially, the pre-test performance of the 126 participants on the phantom operation was suboptimal, ranging from poor to mediocre. Notably, the retest outcomes demonstrated significant surgical performance improvements following the targeted lessons (e.g. blood loss pre-test 906 ± 468 mL, retest 292 ± 173 mL, p < 0.01, n = 35 teams), with the most pronounced enhancements observed in confidence and emergency communication skills (confidence pre-test 2.42 ± 0.52, retest 3.55 ± 0.64, p < 0.01, n = 35 teams). There is a strong tendency (p = 0.08) that the communication group (1.28 ± 0.53) had higher gains in confidence than the bleeding group (0.997 ± 0.4) with a moderate effect size (Cohen’s D = 0.6). Students reported increased confidence in assisting in surgery compared to their initial self-assessments. These results show that the structured exposure to a pre-test-retest phantom operation substantially elevates students’ capability to act safely and assertively in the OR. Discussion: This approach appears to foster a justified increase in confidence and surgical performance, potentially elevating patient safety among students and residents in training.