Commission on the Future of Surgery
Over the past 50 years the capability of technology to improve surgical care has been realised and while surgical trainees and trainers strive to deliver care and train, the technological ‘solutions’ market continues to expand. We have reached a pivotal point in the digital transformation of surgical training, and it is in this context that the Future of Surgery: Technology Enhanced Surgical Training (FOS:TEST) Commission was launched.
The FOS:TEST Commission was formed by the Association of Surgeons in Training (ASiT), The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS England) Robotics and Digital Surgery Group and representatives from all trainee specialty and college associations. Its mission has been to identify unmet surgical training needs, map these to the patient and trainee pathway, and discover potential technological solutions.
For future UK and ROI surgeons to stay relevant in a global market, our training methods must adapt. The Future of Surgery: Technology Enhanced Surgical Training Report provides a blueprint for how this can be achieved. It requires academic expertise and collaboration to evaluate efficacy of any novel training solution, coupled with pragmatic assessments of feasibility and cost to ensure that any intervention is scalable for national implementation. While there is no replacement for hands-on operating, several novel surgical innovations offer promise as technology enhanced adjuncts to traditional training approaches.
The Commission on the Future of Surgery (2018)
The Commission on the Future of Surgery considered innovations in areas such as robot-assisted surgery, data analytics, artificial intelligence, genomics, regenerative medicine, virtual and augmented reality, and 3D printing and planning. In 2018, it reported on the advances in medicine and technology that are likely to change surgical care in the next 20 years. Explore their findings and read the full report.