Saying you’ve seen a procedure was never a part of surgical training..

I have a secret admiration for some aspects of surgical training. We all know the bad ones, so I do not need to talk about them. When Lisa was doing her Mohs’ fellowship, it was the following vector: you watch X procedures, you perform Y procedures under supervision and you then perform Z procedures ‘independently’, with help on hand. After that, you keep learning. Sensible, and has the essential character of what has been known about craft apprenticeships for over one thousand years: apprentice; journeyman; master. This BMJ piece by a urologist asks:

If you were applying for a certificate of completion of training (CCT) in urology in 2015 you had to have seen or assisted in at least 20 radical prostatectomies before being signed off as competent. A year later, for no apparent reason, it appears that 10 will do.

He then goes on:

Standing in a theatre, unscrubbed, so you can say you’ve seen a procedure was never a part of surgical training, nor should it be now. It has no value. Unless you are very good at the procedure already and you are learning nuanced techniques from a master surgeon, watching a procedure will never make you a better surgeon.

Now, I despair of this sort of thing even when we ask medical students to do it. Why, is the question? What value is there, in watching? That this is considered meaningful at this level of training is even more worrying. And of course the figures will be pushed down, over time. This is the NHS, after all; never let expert judgment get in the way of a political imperative or somebody paid by the government: “we have to revise the speed of light for operational reasons….”

There is a more subtle point which makes thinking about the article even more worth while.

Trainees should spend their training doing the things that they’ll be spending their lives doing, not watching procedures they will never perform.

Now, it is clear that the current bull coming out from HEE, NHS, Deans etc is that we don’t need experts anymore, just people to cope with whatever disease is the flavour of the month (that there are demographic changes — pace the lectures I received from John Grimey Evans in 1976— was apparently not obvious to NHS managers or Jeremy Hunt till late 2016). Here is a problem.

When people finish formal training they are not as expert as they will be in 10 or 20 years. I do want an experienced dermatopathologist to be reading the samples I sent him. Wisdom is not the sole preserve of the old, but in many craft or perceptual disciplines I know about, the old guys and women do it better. So, problem one, is that when people come off a training scheme they are not the doctor they want to be. They are not qualified, they are just setting out, able to work without immediate supervision — as they choose and judge. This is the ticket.

The second problem, as the author makes clear, is that the training schemes are wasteful and not geared to excellence. Again, in a world of ‘pull’ (John Seely Brown’s phrase) the NHS is still trapped within the metaphors of the same industrial age that Donald Trump thinks is going to bring all those jobs back.

We have lost our way in much of what is important in medicine. It’s time that we focused on what really makes a surgeon better and stopped the pointless processes that surround training

Amen. But the surgeons have got some things going for them. IMHO many other branches of medicine are much, much worse.