Operation Simulation – New Surgical Training Centre to Feature Cutting-Edge Technology

Surgical skills cannot be mastered by simple observation or by operating skills learned in the anatomy room. The demand for high efficiency and the lack of valuable operating time leaves little time for surgeons to train students within the operating environment.

These clinical pressures, along with the successful introduction of the new eight-year surgical training pathway and the restrictions on working hours under the European Working Time Directive, means there is now a much greater emphasis on off-site training for surgeons.

RCSI National Clinical & Surgical Training Centre

According to Padraig Kelly, associate director of surgical affairs, operations and planning at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland(RCSI), the establishment of the new National Clinical & Surgical Training Centre at RCSI will allow the College to offset the challenges presented by the shorter duration of training and reduced doctors working hours.

“It will enable trainees to learn safe surgical practice, develop their operative skills and it will reinforce the importance of surgical training to patient safety,” he said.

The new simulation facility will be located in RCSI’s new academic education building, in 26 York Street in Dublin’s city centre. It is a state-of-the-art complex that will keep RCSI at the forefront of the education of doctors and healthcare professionals into the future. The new building will be home to 4,500 students and staff and 420 surgical trainees, including emergency medicine trainees and 480 non-trainee non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs).

The new National Clinical & Surgical Training Centre on the top two floors will comprise a cutting-edge surgical and clinical training suite containing a flexible wet laboratory, mock operating theatre, clinical training wards, standardised patients’ rooms and task training rooms.

The surgical training area is designed to enable teaching and training to take place outside the clinical arena in a wet laboratory setting where technical and non-technical skills can be practiced and simulated.

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