Robotic Training in General Surgery Residency: How Early Can We Begin?

Background: The increasing demand for robotics in general surgery has prompted academic institutions to train general surgery residents toward the acquisition of basic robotic skills. Our current robotic training curriculum begins in the PGY-3 year and is based on the use of surgical simulators in a risk-free environment, in which each resident must show proficiency prior to advancing to training on an animate model as PGY-4. Our unpublished data on the curriculum indicates that PGY-3s required additional remediation training on the robotic simulator, suggesting room for improvement in our teaching paradigm [8]. Because of resident duty hour restrictions, we could not provide remediation by simply increasing the number of training sessions. We therefore decided to investigate an alternative strategy of shifting the training to an earlier time point in general surgical residency during PGY-1 and PGY-2 years. To explore the feasibility of a new curriculum, we undertook a pilot study to investigate the willingness of residents in their PGY-1 and PGY-2 years to begin robotic training on the robotic simulator, the dV-Trainer (dV-T). We also wanted to see if even minimal early exposure to the dV-T would help overcome residents' initial diffidence in using the daVinci Surgical System (DaVss).