PLENARY SESSION
Monday, July 7, 2008: 8:30 AM-9:45 AM
OPENING PLENARY: Virtual Reality Training for the Operating Room and Cath Lab: A Paradigm Shift in Medical Training
Learning Objective #1: Understand the evidence (data, societal and political) that has driven the development of a new training paradigm for learning procedural-based medicine.
Learning Objective #2: Be aware of the data that demonstrates that this new evidence-based approach to training is superior to the traditional approach.
High profile cases of medical errors in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) and major reports for professional organizations such as the Institute of Medicine (US) and Senate of Surgery (UK) have sensitized the public and medical professions. Medicine and Professions allied to medicine have identified training as a key area that must be tackled to positively impact on the problem of medical errors. This is particularly important for medical disciplines such as surgery and interventional cardiology where the delivery and quality of care is dependant on the technical skills of the attending physician. Despite the radically novel skills required from the physician to proficiently practice minimally invasive surgery (MIS) or interventional cardiology (IC) the current training paradigm has gone largely unchanged from that used by William Stewart Halsted at Johns Hopkins in the 19th Century. At the end of the 20th century, the public and the medical profession have concluded that training on patients is no longer acceptable. Medicine is currently undergoing a paradigm shift in the way that procedural skills are trained. There are now at least two published studies that have demonstrated in prospective, randomized, double-blinded trails that VR significantly reduces objectively assessed intra-operative errors. This lecture describes the new training paradigm, the methodology required for VR to work effectively and some of the business, political and clinical forces which are driving this change in training practice.
Organizer:Anthony G. Gallagher, RN, PhD