Content area
Full Text
EDITORIAL
www.nature.com/clinicalpractice/uro
The learning curve as a measure of experience
Bertrand D Guillonneau
It is the responsibility of surgeon-teachers to ensure their teaching is ofa high quality, and that they share their experience with students, only using learning curves in the service of patientsor else to eliminate their use.
In surgical training, learning curves are used to plot the number of attempts required to master a difficult procedure, or the number of procedures required to achieve proficiency. It is incorrect to describe a procedure that is difficult to learn as having a steep learning curve, as this implies that large gains in proficiency are achieved over a small number of cases. Instead, the curve for a procedure that requires a lot of cases to reach proficiency should be described as flattened. Learning curves evaluate one para meter at a time and not a procedure in its entirety. They are personal, a graph of an individual surgeons progress. Before the introduction of learning curves, mastery of a surgical technique was judged by ones teachers and peers, and included the accumulation of knowledge, apprenticeship with an...