Teaching difficult airway management: is virtual reality real enough?

Excerpt

Safe management of the difficult airway is one of the fundamental competencies required for clinicians in intensive care medicine (ICM). However, major airway problems are infrequent, and it may be difficult to ensure that trainees achieve and maintain this competency through clinical experience, especially in ICM. Classical classroom-based techniques have significant disadvantages in teaching such practical skills, but emerging advances in information technology provide one solution to this problem. On-line teaching has been documented in areas other than difficult airway management [1, 2] and, in addition to being a practical alternative to conventional teaching, may provide unique benefits. The educational material is highly reproducible and avoids many problems with teaching [3]. Enthusing teachers to give the same lectures and material to residents year on year can be difficult. The material is available to anyone able to connect to the internet—a huge advantage in training programmes that cover large geographical areas [2, 4]. Even written assessment can be performed over the internet with sophisticated programmes designed to prevent cheating [4]. With the ability for on-line video conferencing and real-time talk-back sessions, teaching can be standardised across large areas, and these standards can be reliably maintained as updating of lectures can be performed with ease [3]. …