SkyMed presentation wins award

IAAS

The International Association for Ambulatory Surgery (IAAS) was founded in 1995 to promote exchange of information and advancement of Day Surgery across the world. It acts as an advisory body in the maintenance of standards of patient care and has a long-standing interest in distance learning. A conference is held every two years and prizes consisting of a diploma and 600 euros are awarded to the best papers presented in the categories of Anaesthetics, Management, Nursing, Quality and Surgery. This year's conference, held in Seville, attracted over 1350 delegates, mostly from Europe but also from the United States and even as far away as Australia.

SkyMed evaluation

Dr Carlo Castoro presented the results of the evaluation of SkyMed pilot project to more than 100 conference participants who attended the Management sessions. "Day Surgery Nursing" was the first experimental course of the SkyMed project.

The computer-based training took place during autumn 2003 in seven multimedia classrooms located in the main hospitals of the Veneto region of Italy. Students met for two hours, on two afternoons per week, for self-guided participation and study. The planned duration of the course was 16 hours and 34 nurses underwent SkyMed training.

Upon completion of the course, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire evaluating certain aspects of the course and were interviewed by telephone. Participants expressed enthusiasm about the course and felt that others would benefit from it. Analysis of the completed questionnaires indicated an overall acceptance of the learning model and the usefulness of distance education. On the other hand, difficulties were found in the nature of the contents; they were either too medically rather than clinically oriented or the cultural background differed too much from the local nursing experience (day surgery nursing in the UK compared to that in Italy).

Since the success of these courses can best be gauged in terms of the of the extent to which the knowledge is retained and applied by the participants in improving patient health or operating efficiency, a follow-up study was also carried out 16 months later. Again the participants were asked to complete a questionnaire and were interviewed by telephone. The initial enthusiasm for the course had declined very slightly but the participants were still very positive, were convinced that they were now able to provide higher quality nursing care and in most cases had passed on some of what they had learned to their colleagues.

In summing up Dr Castoro said that the pilot project had demonstrated that SkyMed:

• was an effective teaching tool
• had delivered improvements in clinical quality
• could be used internationally provided attention was paid to local needs

SkyMed team at Trastec

Trastec is an Italian technology transfer company based in Padua, until recently known as Padova Ricerca. They have been involved with Skymed with four other partners - Alenia Spazio (I) prime contractor, ITS (I), Telbios s.p.A (I), and Sudler and Hennesey (UK) - since ESA took the initiative to start the project in August 2000. They have presented papers on SkyMed at several IAAS conferences. The authors of this year's paper were:

• Dr. Carlo Castoro - scientific project leader
• Prof Mauro Zuchetto - past project leader and technical director of Trastec
• Dr. Stefano Merigliano - liaison with local Italian organisations
• Christina Drace - coursework manager

Their paper was chosen as the best from more than thirty others. Christina Drace commented: "The medical community is becoming more aware of the importance of Distance Learning. Our paper is the first to report on practical experience with SkyMed technology in a field trial."