Robotic surgery training update

26 April 2021

Kicking off Robotic Surgery month, Klaus Matzel, Chair of the European School of Coloproctology, highlights the work the school is currently doing in developing a training pathway for colorectal robotic surgery.

The European School of Coloproctology (ESC) of the ESCP offers a year-round platform for educational opportunities. As treatment modalities, training and assessment are constantly evolving, and with an increasing appreciation that skills are correlated with patient outcomes, adaption and changes are needed to ensure we meet the contemporary approach to education and training. These changes must be supported and implemented under the guidance of surgical/scientific societies and professional bodies rather than outside agencies who may have different agendas.

The aims of the ESC are:

to promote up-to-date knowledge and practice in coloproctology for colleagues at different stages of their professional careers
to cover a broad spectrum of content in the field of coloproctology
to offer various formats of teaching/content delivery and training and to support colleagues and industry partners throughout the introduction of new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities.

ESC is responsible for the design of the objectives and educational contents of the various activities. ESC strives to implement contemporary concepts of education and training.

One of the current ESC workstreams is robotic colorectal surgery. It is an area with rapidly growing interest and high demand for structured, reproducible and measurable training. As part of the ESC, the Colorectal Robotic Surgery Working Group (CRS WG, Colorobotica) was set up to benchmark training in robotic colorectal surgery and ultimately aimed to optimise patients’ outcomes. The educational activities include a series of eight webinars, 'From basic skills to fine art', delivered over 14 months in 2020 and 2021. The first webinar series is now on viewable on this website.

The development of a training pathway in colorectal robotic surgery with a staged delivery of educational content, including e-learning modules, case observation, dry/wet lab hands-on training, proctoring and procedure assessment, is in an advanced stage. The programme is expected to be launched in Q2 2021.

The CRS WG includes expert robotic colorectal surgeons with educational interest, surgeons with strong interests in enhanced learning and assessment, academic anatomist specialising in applied anatomy, visual communicators to support the module development, IT specialists with specific interests in learning management systems and innovation in learning and a team to support administrative and research tasks.

Some of our work so far (concepts, data, and results) in different areas of this program have been published in Colorectal Disease. We believe some of these new concepts and endeavours would benefit our colorectal and scientific communities.