I realized quite some time back that when you train someone to operate in a particular way, the person often does not do it the way you show him/her. That is related to the angle of vision while looking at the operating hands and the instruments held in them. My angle is the angle the trainee must have, so that everything will happen as it would in my hands. Unfortunately most of the times we train people standing on the other side of the patient for abdominal surgery, and on one side for vaginal surgery. The result is that the trainee ends up holding the instruments in a different way, and operates in a different way too. My solution to this problem is to stand next to the trainee, and hold the instruments right next to his hands in a parallel position, and mime. I don't actually cut anything then, but just pretend to. The trainee then does it exactly the same way, because he has seen everything as he would have seen while doing it himself. The results of this technique are infinitely superior to those of assisting and training from the other side of the operation table.
