The influence of anesthesia clerkship for medical students on timings in surgical cases: An observational study.

Background: The anesthesia clerkship is one of several specialties which medical students learn in the operating room. Learning from the clerkship in the operating room may affect patient care and starting time for surgical cases. We hypothesized actual time spent teaching the medical student affects the starting time surgical cases more than residents and student nurse anesthetists. Methods: This prospective study was conducted between April-July 2022. We included the patients with American Society of Anesthesiologist status I-III, underwent elective Obstetric-Gynecologic surgery/ General surgery. We examined actual time spent teaching in these cases between the fifth-year medical student, anesthesiology residents, and student nurse anesthetists by using ANOVA comparison. The actual time spent teaching were defined as Anesthesia Release Time, Anesthesia-Controlled Time, Anesthetic Preparation Time, and Anesthetic Procedure Time. Results: 111 procedures were performed (33.3% 5 th year medical students, 33.3% residents, and 33.3% student nurse anesthetist). Our study examined statistically significant increased time spent in the 5 th year medical student group when compared with resident group and student nurse anesthetist: Anesthesia Release Time spent more prolong than that in residents group (5.486 minutes, p=0.0015), and student nurse anesthetists (4.973 minutes, p=0.0038), Anesthesia-Controlled Time spent longer than residents and student nurse anesthetists (11.243 minutes (p <0.001) and 3.27 minutes (p= 0.067), respectively), and Anesthetic Procedure Time spent longer than that in residents and student nurse anesthetists (4.027 minutes (p = 0.0015), and 2.7297 minutes (p= 0.03), respectively). The scale for difficulty of case induction in the 5 th year medical student group was higher than that of the other groups (p < 0.001). However, the number of successful of procedures were not statistically significant difference between the groups. Also, intraoperative and 24-hour postoperative complications were not significantly different between the groups (p=0.371, p=0.385, respectively). Conclusions: We examined the presence of 5 th -year medical students contributed to a prolonged case time, the overall impact did not appear to be clinically significant. However, teaching undergraduate medical education to 5 th -year medical students remains the key roles of teaching hospitals and does not contribute significantly to a reduction in operating theatre output in this clinical setting. Trial registration: TCTR20220418006