A recently published GIRFT study in The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England identified that elective surgical hubs across England have made a positive contribution to training opportunities for orthopaedic trainees. 

The study, entitled  Comparison of orthopaedic specialty registrar training opportunities in trusts with and without an elective surgical hub, linked data from the Hospital Episodes Statistics dataset on procedure numbers with data from The Joint Committee on Surgical Training (JCST) eLogbook database for the period from April 2017 to March 2023.  Data for six high-volume low complexity elective orthopaedic procedures were studied covering 1,755 trainees acting as first surgeon in 125,759 procedures.  

From the start to the end of the study period, trusts with access to an elective surgical hub had a significantly greater increase in the proportion of procedures conducted by a trainee compared with trusts without access to a hub: from 16.8% (2017/18) to 18.3% (20122/23) in hub trusts compared to an increase from 16.0% to 16.2% in non-hub trusts. However, the authors noted that most of the increase in trainee involvement was associated with more senior trainees (ST6-8). Additionally, the proportional increase was not enough to offset the decline in the absolute number of procedures conducted by trainees across all trusts in England; 25,598 in 2017/18 to 21,057 in 2022/23. 

The authors concluded that elective surgical hubs have the potential to support orthopaedic specialist registrar trainees in their training, but that more needs to be done to ensure that the quality and quantity of opportunities offered are sufficient to adequately train the next generation of orthopaedic surgeons.    

The study was carried out by Elizabeth Ojelade, GIRFT clinical fellow; Professor Tim Briggs, GIRFT chair; and William Gray, GIRFT’s academic content lead.