To understand if and how OB/GYN residents utilize surgical videos to supplement their surgical education.

Design:

Cross-sectional descriptive study from February to March 2022 with convenience sampling technique

Setting:

N/A

Patients or Participants:

129 residents at ACGME accredited OB/GYN programs.

Interventions:

A voluntary and anonymous survey was sent via email by residency program coordinators throughout the U.S. A randomized drawing for an Amazon gift card valued at $100 was offered as incentive for survey completion.

Measurements and Main Results:

All data was collected using RedCap. Fisher’s exact test used for categorical variables. Continuous variables were examined for normality using the Shapiro-Wilk test; normally distributed continuous variables were compared using the Student’s t test and those non-normally distributed were compared using the Mann-Whitney U test.

The vast majority of residents (82% of respondents, n=106) use surgical videos to supplement their GYN surgical education. The most commonly used source was YouTube. There was no difference in sources of video education by residency year (Google (P=0.9656), YouTube (P=0.8816), SurgeryU (P=0.1810), SGS (P=0.4842), MIGS 101 (P=0.4264), Twitter (P>0.99)). TikTok was not identified as being used for surgical video education.

Conclusion:

Surgical videos are highly utilized to supplement GYN surgical training outside of the formal curriculum. The most commonly identified source of surgical video education was YouTube, which is a non-curated and non-peer reviewed form of video education. Formal, peer-reviewed sources such as IAPS and SGS video library had lower utilization rates by residents than open-ended “Google” searches. This data suggests that residency programs should formalize incorporating surgical education videos into their GYN curriculum.