Outcomes of strabismus surgery with or without trainee participation as surgeon.

Purpose: To compare success rates of strabismus surgery that involves trainees versus those performed solely by staff surgeons.

Design: Retrospective, comparative case series.

Subjects: Patients undergoing eye muscle surgery for primarily horizontal deviations.

Methods: Retrospective comparative case series of 543 patients (921 eyes) undergoing eye muscle surgery, with or without trainee participation, for horizontal deviations.

Main Outcome Measures: Success in surgery defined as residual horizontal deviations of 10 prism diopters or less.

Results: Trainees were involved in surgeries on 396 patients (672 eyes), whereas only staff surgeons operated on 147 patients (249 eyes). After minimum follow-up of 8 weeks, there was no overall significant difference between the success rates of procedures that involved trainees as surgeons and those that did not (P = 0.59).

Conclusions: The involvement of trainees as operators in surgeries on horizontal eye muscles does not result in a worse outcome than surgeries exclusively performed by staff. With a shift toward competency-based education and more scrutiny of patient outcomes, these data further support the quality of surgical care provided by trainees.