There is information for patients about to have an operation. We include ward care plans for the nursing and other staff. There are diagrams, photographs, animations, and video runs, plus a choice of UK and USA English sound track. Interactive features include customising each step of the operation, and the equipment and materials. There are calculators for safe volumes of drugs, and of the difficulty and duration of the operations.
Simulators advise trainees when to convert to a safer operation.
There are quizzes with scoring. The system may well eclipse many traditional methods of training in operative surgery. The future The future holds exciting possibilities, but care is needed not to overstate the value of the system. It has not been demonstrated to be better than a textbook, though with at least fifty times the amount of information, common sense would suggest it was. It should be easy to test the system objectively by randomly training groups of junior surgeons with or without CurrentTechniques in Surgery, and measuring speed and thoroughness of learning.