A course for registrars
A James Cook University surgical skills course organised in Cairns. It was pleasing to see how much the registrars got out of it.
With Tony O'Neill, Robert Pozzi, Arvind Puri and Peter Myers.
Courses of this kind are how registrars in regional centres get hands-on practice that would otherwise require travelling to a capital city.
What a surgical skills course involves
A surgical skills course gives trainees the chance to practise operative steps away from a live operating list. Depending on the course, that may involve bone models, simulators or cadaveric specimens, with experienced surgeons supervising each station. Trainees work through the approaches and techniques themselves, make mistakes without consequence to a patient, and have those mistakes corrected on the spot.
Why cadaver courses exist
Real anatomy varies, and it does not look like a diagram. A cadaveric specimen lets a trainee find a nerve where it actually lies rather than where a textbook places it, feel how much force tissue will tolerate, and learn a surgical approach in full before attempting part of it on a patient. For procedures that pass close to structures which must not be injured, that kind of rehearsal is difficult to substitute with anything else.
Training in regional centres
James Cook University trains doctors in north Queensland, and orthopaedic registrars rotate through regional hospitals as part of their training. Running a skills course in Cairns, rather than expecting trainees to travel south for it, removes a significant barrier of cost and time away from a roster. It also brings faculty to a regional centre, which supports the consultants working there as well as the trainees.
Teaching registrars is work the specialty does for itself. The habits formed during training tend to persist for decades, so the hours spent on a course like this one are among the more durable contributions a surgeon can make.
Related information
See our other Cairns posts, including the brachial plexus teaching session, and our shoulder surgery page.