Surgical simulation training for escharotomy: A novel course, improving candidate's confidence in a time critical procedure

Background: Circumferential deep burns on the limb lead to a constrictive, tourniquet-like effect causing critical limb ischaemia. The treatment, escharotomy, is a time-critical pro-cedure that sometimes is required before the patient arrives at a burn centre. At present, no practical method of teaching this procedure is incorporated into formal educational courses.Methods: The feasibility of a comprehensive education package to teach upper limb es-charotomy was assessed in a group of plastic and general surgery trainees in Wales. Small group workshops focused on the clinical presentation of patients requiring escharotomy. Participants then executed this on a custom-made high-fidelity simulation upper limb model. The articulated limb has subcutaneous silicone fat which bulges upon decom-pression and a finger-tip which turns pink indicating satisfactory reperfusion. A before and after five-point Likert scale was used to evaluate changes in participants' self-assessed confidence in the surgical management of escharotomy. Statistical significance between scores was assessed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.Results: A total of 34 participants took part. Following completion of the course, general surgery trainees' confidence in executing the procedure increased from a median score of 1.00 "not confident at all" (IQR 1.00-2.00) to 4.00 "fairly confident" (IQR 4.00-5.00, p < 0.01). Plastic surgery trainees' confidence increased from a median score of was 3.00 "somewhat confident" (IQR 1.75-4.00) to 4.00 "fairly confident" (IQR 3.00-4.25, p < 0.01). Discussion: We developed a comprehensive simulator course that has been demonstrated to improve candidate's confidence in performing escharotomy. The next stage in the course development is to confirm the results in a larger cohort. By developing this simu-lator course we aim to improve emergency burn care education in the UK and globally. Crown Copyright (c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.