A NEW APPROACH FOR CHANGING TIMES

Surgical Education in Canada’s Residency Programs are incorporating competency based simulation as part of the new curricula. Dr. Marie-Ève LeBel describes changes in the Canadian surgical residency programs in her field of orthopaedics.

Medical education and surgical residency programs are currently going through major changes. Reduced working hours, financial restrictions within the Canadian healthcare system and increasing patient knowledge are just a few of the many challenges influencing the way in which we educate our residents, as well as work and interact with them. Against this backdrop and given the current transition from an apprenticeship model to a competency- based model, program directors are called upon to rethink and redesign training curricula for today’s medical learners. As an associate professor of surgery at Western University in London, ON, Canada, and an orthopaedic surgeon at the Roth | McFarlane Hand and Upper Limb Centre, I was asked by our Program Director and Division Chair to design a simulation training curriculum for our orthopaedics residency program at Western University. This mandate involved creating a new curriculum that reflects the recent recommendations by the Royal College to incorporate competency- based training tools (including Simulation) into the educational process, in keeping with the needs of our orthopaedics residents and our program. In this article, I will be focusing on my experience in developing the new simulation curriculum and exploring new opportunities with innovative simulation tools such as the Sim-OrthoTM VR training simulator developed by OSSimTech, a simulation company based in Montréal, QC, Canada.

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