Beyond “See One, Do One, Teach One”

Excerpt

In 2016 it was reported that medical error was the third leading cause of death in the USA [1]. This is not yet reflected in official death statistics but let’s not kid ourselves, the pressure on us to improve patient safety is going to increase. This issue was addressed in one of the keynote lectures of the neuroRAD 2018, the 53rd Annual Conference of the German Society for Neuroradiology, which took place from 3–6 October 2018 in Frankfurt. Matthias Münzberg (Trauma Surgery, BG Hospital Ludwigshafen) and Martin Egerth (Lufthansa Aviation Training) pointed out that medical errors are caused by a variety of reasons, including communication problems, inadequate information flow, medication errors and also inadequate training. How would you feel if you boarded an airplane and right before take-off the pilot announced: “Welcome aboard. This flight is my first as a pilot. But don’t worry, I watched other pilots fly several times and I read a book”. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But more or less, that’s how it works in interventional training. While the content of medical education is continuously changing, reflecting advances in medical science, our practices of training physicians have hardly changed over the past decades. The neuroRAD 2018 addressed this issue also by featuring the first course of the German Stroke School. This 3‑day course prepared young residents for interventional stroke therapy through a combination of high-quality teaching and proficiency-based extensive hands-on training using the latest simulation techniques by Mentice AB (Gothenburg, Sweden). Encouragingly, there were also a number of scientific presentations on methods to improve interventional training [2‐6]. While the German Stroke School was definitely praised by participants, we can’t afford to rest on that. This was just one of many steps we still have to go to increase patient safety. …