REVIEW article
Front. Surg.
Sec. Orthopedic Surgery
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsurg.2025.1605495
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Benign Surgery: Techniques, Outcomes, and Educational InnovationsView all 5 articles
Overview of surgical training and assessment of surgical skills. A narrative review.
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Neurosurgery, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, Sweden
- 2Department of Translational Medicine - Hand surgery, Lund University Sweden, Lund, Sweden
- 3Department of surgery, Section of Endocrine and Sarcoma Surgery, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden
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AbstractObjectives: To assess the existence of international, scientifically validated methods for manual surgical skills training and assessment. The aim was to create a descriptive chronological summary of the existing evidence and conclusions in the included articles. Methods: PubMed and SCOPUS were searched twice for reviews published between 1997 and October 2023, and between 1997 and January 2024. The search terms used were “review”, "surgical training", "surgical skills", “assessment” and “evaluation” in combinations. In all, 38 reviews were included (systematic and non-systematic). In addition 30 non-reviews were selected for the introduction and the historical background. Publications on non-technical skills were excluded.Results: Great efforts have been invested by committees and working groups to define methods for surgical training and assessment. However, the work was found to be scattered, without attempts to be overarching and internationally valuable, and few training methods were strictly scientifically validated. Many reviews were limited to 1) one surgical procedure, 2) to one surgical specialty, 3) to one surgical method like endoscopic procedures or “robotics” or 4) to a limited geographical area.Conclusions: Scientifically validated, generally applicable methods for surgical training and assessment could not be found. More research is needed to find simple, equal and overarching methods to allow valid and reliable comparisons of manual surgical competences across borders In a financially strained health care, resources for adequate training and evaluation of skills may not be available. Financial aspects can be included in future studies, to correlate costs for training with costs for avoidable surgical complications.
Keywords: surgical training, review of reviews, surgical skills, Assessment of surgical skills, Evidence-based traning and assessment methods
Received: 03 Apr 2025; Accepted: 02 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Berg, Dahlin and Kjellman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Margareta Berg, Department of Neurosurgery, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, Sweden
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