In 2019, a partnership between Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Operational Center Paris (OCP) and UBC-BISC was agreed upon to create a surgical task-sharing curriculum, in order to help build capacity in MSF-surgical projects in South Sudan.
View information on the initial partnership here.
Report Summary: Three trainees initially enrolled into this first cohort of the Essential Surgical Skills (ESS) program, beginning on July 1, 2019 and with a planned program completion date of December 31, 2021. Two are now still active trainees. Data collection for Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) began on January 1, 2020, and for procedure logbooks on March 1, 2020. EPAs for this curriculum were adapted from the Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) framework, with individual technical and non-technical skills selected based on the case mix of this particular MSF context. Each EPA is scored using the O-SCORE Entrustability scale, a validated 5-point Likert scale, where a score > 4 is indicative of successful competency in that specific EPA. EPAs were clustered in 8 different modules, representing different areas of essential surgical care (Table 1.) This report represents data collected up to July 31, 2021.
Updates: Overall, the three trainees demonstrated a significant contribution to the surgical volume at Aweil State Hospital, performing 31% of all surgical procedures at the institution and have completed a total of 416 Procedures and 251 EPAs.
