The NASA Task Load Index study measuring the technical difficulty of performing an operation.

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The technical difficulty each individual operation creates for a surgeon is difficult to measure. Each surgeon knows after an operation how easy or hard it was, but there are no accurate measures of this difficulty. In a research setting and in a teaching setting it would be valuable to be able to accurately measure this degree of difficulty. Any new surgical technique or intervention needs to be measured for improvements in clinical outcomes. It would also be beneficial to measure any improvement in technical difficulty for the surgeon. The ability of a trainee to learn a new operation, and the ability to measure a trainees progress is also beneficial. This project will measure the NASA Task Load Index (NASA TLX) and correlate this against other current, relatively weak, measures of technical difficulty. The NASA TLX produces a numerical score for each operation, and this can be measured against clinical outcome parameters. The study does not alter the clinical or operative management of the patient, but merely has the surgeon complete a survey immediately after the operation, along with other clinical outcome parameters. The project will study eight surgeons from both upper gastrointestinal and colorectal surgery, and at two levels of experience: consultant surgeons and post-fellowship advanced trainees. Each surgeon will enrol 20 patients to the study, giving an adequate volume per surgeon to detect a correlation, plus a total of 160 operations overall to produce overall power of the study.

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