Democratizing surgical training

The Need

Surgery is a cornerstone of global public health, but at least five billion people can’t get it.

Access to surgical care is largely a function of location. Residents of rich countries can get it, while those in low-resource settings can’t.

As a result, more people die from lack of surgery annually than from HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria combined. And in contrast to COVID-19, which has claimed >6.2 million lives since 2020, >16.9 million people die each year because they couldn’t get surgical care. The status quo is deadly.

The Causes

There are many causes—known and unknown. We do know that surgery is expensive for patients and payers. It requires specialized training, making it difficult to scale. And access to surgical know-how is largely gated out of fear that formal education is the only way to ensure quality of care.

The world needs to train more health workers to confidently and competently perform surgery. But simply put, surgical training is old school. See one, do one, teach one—the maxim of medical education—relies on an apprenticeship model to train surgical practitioners. While the model works for many, it isn’t keeping pace with expanding need. Stated another way, people die everyday due to a lack of innovation in the training of surgical practitioners.

The Solution

To create a world where all health care workers—regardless of title—have the ability to learn, practice, and self-assess new surgical skills, new training models are needed.

That’s where the Global Surgical Training Challenge comes in.

Back in 2020, Intuitive Foundation launched the Global Surgical Training Challenge to stimulate the creation of novel, low-cost surgical training modules. These open-source modules help surgical practitioners to learn and assess new skills to improve the health of their communities. Trainings have been built outside of traditional educational institutions, by teams of interdisciplinary practitioners, and shared freely with the world on an open-source platform.

While working at MIT Solve, Patrick Diamond, designed and delivered a unique virtual workshop series to form interdisciplinary teams from all over the world and equip them with the right tools and methods to develop trainings.

Workshop participants did not have much experience with innovation methods such as human-centered design, user journey mapping, and rapid prototyping. Through multiple innovation workshops, Patrick tailored freely available resources for practical use by hundreds of diverse participants.

The Results

• Recruited and engaged 323 participants from 73 countries.

• Designed and produced 10 multi-hour workshops to build design teams and prototype trainings.

• Enabled busy medical professionals to form interdisciplinary teams and to compete for $5 million in funding to prototype trainings—virtually, across the globe, and during the worst phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Surgical experts identified four teams—all of which participated in the workshop—as exceptionally innovative, potentially impactful, and appropriate for use in low-resource settings.

• In follow-up surveys, teams credited the workshops as a fundamental contributor to their success.

Methods used