Creating a Validated Robotic Curriculum for Resident and Fellow Education

Systematic review to establish absolute standards for technical performance in surgery

“…Standard‐setting studies incorporated participants at various stages of their career. Of the 37 articles, 26 included postgraduate trainees (residents and interns). For example, Tjiam and colleagues established certification standards for residents in laparoscopic urological skills by comparing global ratings of a cohort of staff surgeons and trainees stratified by case volume into expert, intermediate and novice groups.…”

“…Of these, 12 were derived from a simulated surgical environment and only one from a clinical setting ( Table ). Unlike the participant‐centred literature, the majority of item‐centred studies used task‐specific metrics to set standards, ten in total, whereas only one used global rating alone, and two used a combination of global rating and task‐specific methods ( Table ). One group of authors has published multiple studies that utilize a task‐specific checklist to assess internal medicine residents' technical skill in a variety of bedside procedures.…”

“…These studies were able to use Angoff and Hofstee methods (both item‐based) to set standards in simulated tasks, as the environment and steps of the procedure were highly controlled. Conversely, Green and co‐workers developed an adaption of the objective structured assessment of technical skill (OSATS), the Robotic‐OSATS (R‐OSATS), to assess trainees in robotic surgery as they progressed through a highly structured simulator curriculum.…”

“…As noted in Table , all open and endoscopic procedure studies used participant‐centred methodology. Ten studies determined competency benchmarks in laparoscopic and robotic surgery, ten set standards in bedside procedures using item‐centred methodology, and only two used participant‐centred techniques.…”

“…The second most commonly used method of standard setting was the Angoff method, an item‐centred technique. This method was developed to establish cut‐off points in assessment, and traditionally has been applied to written assessments.…”