Teacher and Trainee Learning Together-Dual Console and the 3 Arms.

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to propose a method by which the trainer and the trainee can overcome their learning curves together.

Design/setting/participants: At a tertiary care facility where we have completely done away with the mandatory bedside procedure requirements, residents and fellows start all cases on the console and have graduated responsibilities assigned to them. Bedside assist cases were felt to take away from trainee precious console time when there were only on service for a limited period while providing laparoscopic skill training without any robot-specific experience. This is a cumulative experience of teaching residents and fellows under this system and its results.

Results: All trainees at a PG 3 level or greater were able to perform advanced hiatal dissection within 5 cases.

Conclusions: The authors propose a paradigm that uses all 3 arms of the robot and a dual console system.