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Education
Taking surgical training to a new level in Zoom
When COVID-19 caused the cancellation of the Cardiothoracic Surgery Trainees Meeting in May, convenor Dr Chris Cole took the meeting online with outstanding results. So far this year there have been two professional firsts for Dr Chris Cole, a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Back in February, he performed a worldfirst operation when he combined cardiology and cardiac surgery techniques to give a patient who’d been turned down for surgery with standard techniques a chance to return to normal life instead of an impending demise. The 51-year-old patient had a completely calcified aorta due to radiotherapy as a child. In his 20s he’d had a mechanical valve replacement, but it had come loose. The valve was now tearing up red blood cells and swinging in and out of the heart, so Dr Cole created an operation that replaced the mechanical valve without going near the aorta at all.
Then in May, COVID-19 travel restrictions forced the cancellation of the Cardiothoracic Surgery (CTS) Trainees Meeting. As convenor of the meeting, Dr Cole came up with an original and innovative way to run a comprehensive virtual learning program in place of the meeting. He also endeavoured to incorporate feedback from the Board of Cardiothoracic Surgery about unsuccessful Fellowship exam candidates needing more integrated knowledge. In addition, he wanted to include one of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons’ (RACS) surgical competencies, technical competency, in a virtual meeting. Welcoming the Trainees The Australian and New Zealand Society of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgeons (ANZSCTS) is a small specialty and this means SET (Surgical Education Training) Trainees are often geographically isolated from their peers. “Often they’re the only Trainee in that hospital, and sometimes the only Trainee in the city or state,” Dr Cole said. A particularly large cohort of Trainees last year meant there were 10 Trainees who had never met anybody else training in Cardiothoracic Surgery. “If we’d had a face-to-face meeting it would have been their first opportunity to meet other Trainees,” he added. With this in mind, Dr Cole sent all 40 Trainees a hamper before the meeting with a message that read:
Dr Chris Cole
‘Keeping isolated at this time has saved us and our patients, but at the expense of meeting together. I hope this package makes our virtual meeting more like a face-
to-face meeting, and reminds you that the journey to being a cardiothoracic surgeon is not one you are taking alone.’ At the virtual meeting, Dr Cole asked the Trainees to introduce themselves and explain where they were from and who they were to “put names to faces,” Dr Cole said. “It was important for SET 1 Trainees to know that they’re not alone, that it’s collegial and that we’re here for them,” he explained. Planning the virtual Trainees Meeting program Dr Cole knew he didn’t want the Trainees “sitting there having lectures” so he created activities to engage them on multiple levels. In order to encourage interaction between the Trainees and faculty he used Zoom, which has a function called ‘Breakout Rooms’. This meant he was able to split the Zoom meeting into separate sessions for small group discussions and then bring them back together into a large single meeting when required. As Zoom host he was able to switch between the small group sessions himself, and also group – either manually or automatically – the Trainees, faculty and presenters into specific sessions. Dr Cole used 15 Breakout Rooms for 46 SET Trainees, post-SET pre-Fellowship and Specialist International Medical Graduates; 24 faculty and 11 presenters. The sessions were conducted over three days and each Breakout Room was equipped with audio, video and screenshare capabilities. Zoom meetings are usually arranged by email invitation, but Dr Cole wanted to avoid overloading the participants’ inboxes, so he created a website to
