Surgeons prepared for every eventuality

Established by the University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust, and Warwick Medical School, the new £1.5 m West Midlands Surgical Training Centre is the UK’s first medical and surgical training facility built from scratch to provide comprehensive simulation of a real operating environment. Funded by the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority, it is also “one of only a handful” of UK medical training facilities to have been granted a Human Tissue Authority licence that allows trainee surgeons to practise on cadaveric material, providing them with what lecturers say is “a far more realistic” operating experience than they would have via more conventional practice on models.

Eight individual stations

Officially opened by England’s chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson on 4 June, the centre incorporates eight individual operating stations, each designed to simulate a self-contained operating theatre. Each features a bespoke mobile operating table with electric height adjustment, integrated fluid drainage, and interchangeable radiolucent tabletop for different types of surgery. The stations also each feature a stack with arthroscopic cameras, light sources, shavers and power tools, plus multiple power sockets, data ports, an adjustable pressure water supply and suction. Operating lights, video cameras and flat screen monitors work in tandem to allow detailed viewing of a range of different surgical procedures undertaken in conditions that mirror, as realistically as possible, those seen in a hospital operating theatre. Up to 70 trainees within the facility, at any one time, will be able to watch and learn surgical techniques being undertaken at any station, with the live images simultaneously relayed to wallmounted repeater screens to ensure the best possible view. With the various components linked to a Brandon Medical Symposia digital media package (see panel), procedures and techniques can also be demonstrated, and trainee surgeons and doctors can “practise” while, for instance, an audience of their counterparts, or a surgeon leading their course or “tele-mentoring” them, observes their progress from other locations within the hospital. Two-way links to an adjacent seminar room, and to the lecture theatre in the University Hospital’s nearby clinical sciences building, will enable tuition in many different surgical procedures to be undertaken at these locations with live or recorded video footage “beamed” to the students there.