The human anatomy is the same independent of nationality, culture, religion and socio-economic status. For this reason, we believe that the surgical profession should be internationally equal and comparable. Any patient needing a surgical procedure has the right to be operated by a well-trained surgeon, which we believe is in accordance with the Declaration of Human Rights from 1948.
We do not find any consistent or overarching rules or regulations for manual surgical training in the scientific literature, and our belief is that such training should be performed by scientifically validated training methods. This principle constitutes the long-term vision of our organization.
The Surgicon Foundation is based on a global network of surgeons especially interested in the topic. The Foundation works as a hub, a knowledge-centre or you may call it a Think-Tank. The goal is to inspire colleagues to perform a variety of well-designed scientifically validated studies within the domain of surgical training. The results of these studies can be presented at the Surgicon Congress, which was priorly held in 2011, 2013 and 2021.
Why focus on Surgical Training?
Health-care injuries are inevitable. They depend on the initial status of each patient, but also on the competence and skills of the attending medical staff. Each year, a number of in-hospital injuries cause prolonged hospital stays, prolonged morbidity, and prolonged sick-leave. Sometimes they result in permanent dysfunction, partial or total work impairment or in some cases death. With care-related injuries we mean any form of unforeseen medical damage taking place during a hospital visit. The calculated cost for prolonged hospital stay caused by these injuries (on average 6 days) represents 13-14% of the total budget for Swedish healthcare.
Some reports have shown about 3.000 deaths / year from healthcare injuries in Sweden, which might be compared to the number of deaths from road traffic accidents of 200-250 / year. Large governmental investments in safer roads have been made for many years, but corresponding economical investments to reduce avoidable injuries and deaths due to healthcare injuries have not been seen. Statistics are scarce and different types of injuries are mixed in official reports. Due to the best of our knowledge, existing ICD-10 codes for ”surgical complications” T 81.0-81.9 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases, WHO, 2011) are not systematically registered in a way that would allow any comparison between surgical specialities or between countries.
Aim
To create an open collaboration without any form of competition by connecting key opinion leaders, surgical societies, governmental bodies, the surgical industry and other engaged authorities – for the benefit of surgeons in training, mature surgeons acting as teachers and for every single patient.
We intend to be a forum for collection of scientific data, for the extraction of recommendations from such data – free for anyone to follow. In this way our long-term goal to harmonise surgical training and surgical skills internationally might be reached, in a distant future.
