Original articleClinical endoscopyTraining and transfer of colonoscopy skills: a multinational, randomized, blinded, controlled trial of simulator versus bedside training
Section snippets
Materials and methods
This was a prospective, multicenter, randomized, blinded evaluation of training at 4 endoscopy training centers in 3 countries—St Mark's Hospital, London, United Kingdom; Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam and the Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and the A. Gemelli University Hospital, Rome, Italy. The study was approved by all 4 institutional review boards and was given a rating of educational evaluation by the UK National Research Ethics Service and the Amsterdam ethical
Study participants
Forty trainees were randomized, with 36 completing the study. Two trainees did not start because of limitations in availability of endoscopy sessions, 1 trainee completed the simulator pretraining assessment but had to leave for personal reasons before commencing the training, and 1 trainee completed the training and simulator assessments but did not complete all 3 patient-based assessment cases (Fig. 2).
The subjects and controls were reasonably well-matched in their demographics and previous
Discussion
In this study we aimed to address weaknesses in previous studies by assessing a large number of trainees from multiple centers in a prospective, randomized, blinded study. The use of patient-based training as a control allowed performance comparisons for 111 simulated and 109 clinical cases. We found that the equivalent time spent on the simulator resulted in significantly greater improvements in performance on the simulator tasks than did traditional, patient-based training. We also found that
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DISCLOSURE: All authors disclosed no financial relationships relevant to this publication.
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