A grant has been awarded to the anatomy team at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) to develop and provide surgical training using various methods, including live streaming, virtual reality, and 360 cameras.
The £344,000 grant from Health Education Kent Surrey and Sussex will allow the medical school to collaborate with NHS partners to establish and deliver surgical training, which has been limited since COVID-19 began last year.
Prof Claire Smith, BSMS’s head of anatomy, said: “COVID-19 has had a significant effect on surgical staff practical preparation, with many providers being forced to close or limit operations during the pandemic. Surgical personnel school, on the other hand, is also in high demand. With this grant, we will be able to provide critical surgical training through live streaming, virtual reality (VR), and 360 cameras, as well as develop a suite of surgical training tools that will be accessible to surgeons all over the world.”
The grant was awarded following a fruitful week-long course at BSMS in September 2020, during which 360 surgeons from 26 countries participated in the ‘virtual reality in medicine and surgery course. Dr. Jag Dhanda presented the study, a consultant maxillofacial/head and reconstructive neck surgeon at Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, who demonstrated surgical procedures on cadavers using virtual reality (VR) 360-degree cameras via live stream. Surgeons used virtual reality headsets to display surgical techniques on corpses, which allowed them to select the camera angle viewpoint they needed by turning their heads.
“COVID-19 has forced us to re-evaluate our surgical teaching techniques,” Dr. Dhanda said. The success of using readily available technologies like virtual reality to provide trainees with a much more immersive experience has been a significant plus. Working with the incredible gift of individuals who donate their bodies for medical training in the BSMS anatomy lab through live streaming and virtual reality has enabled us to develop an innovative and highly effective approach to surgical teaching when it’s simply not possible to gather a group of people to learn specific skills.”
The team will design and deliver various courses to meet surgeons’ training needs at multiple levels and specialties. Also, they will develop a collection of high-quality surgical and anatomy tools, including virtual reality and 360-degree videos, that can be stored on the secure university, college, and NHS servers and used to provide on-demand training and education.
