Clinical trial NCT04426227: Gaze Training on Task Performance Regional Anaesthesia
Official title: The Effect of Gaze Training on Task Performance and Skill Acquisition in Ultrasound-guided Regional Anaesthesia: a Partially Blinded Randomised Controlled Trial.
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Phase: PHASE3
Conditions: Anesthesia
Lead sponsor: University of Nottingham
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2020-06-11
Enrollment: 43
Sex: ALL
Standard ages: CHILD
ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: OTHER

Brief summary: Regional anaesthesia is the performance of spinal, epidural or peripheral nerve blocks to allow patients to undergo surgery awake and to provide post-operative pain relief. Anaesthetists inject local anaesthetic using specialist needles close to nerves to prevent transmission of pain. Hand-held ultrasound is often used by anaesthetists to direct these needles to the correct position i.e. close to, but not in the nerve itself. If the needle is not adequately seen using the hand-held ultrasound it may pierce the nerve causing permanent nerve damage and significant patient harm.

Within the time and resource constraints of postgraduate medical training, it would be advantageous to optimise expertise acquisition of practical skills with a cheap, self-directed educational intervention. Therefore, the aim of this study is to determine whether gaze training is associated with improved performance of an ultrasound-guided needle task. The investigators hypothesise that improved gaze control will translate to better technical performance of an ultrasound-guided regional anaesthesia task.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering or Maths (STEM) students who are capable of giving informed consent

Exclusion Criteria:

* Previous experience of gaze training or eye tracking software
* Previous experience of regional anaesthesia needling tasks

Primary outcomes:
measure: Change in Composite Error Score
timeFrame: Undertaken during ultrasound assessment 1 (before training intervention) and during ultrasound assessment 2 (which will occur 10 minutes after the training intervention was undertaken). Each assessment will be 15 minutes in duration.
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Change in Global Rating Scale
timeFrame: Undertaken during ultrasound assessment 1 (before training intervention) and during ultrasound assessment 2 (which will occur 10 minutes after the training intervention). Each assessment will be 15 minutes in duration.
Other outcomes:
measure: Change in Task completion time
timeFrame: Undertaken during ultrasound assessment 1 (before training intervention) and during ultrasound assessment 2 (which will occur 10 minutes after the training intervention was undertaken). Each assessment will be 15 minutes in duration.
measure: Change in Fixation durations
timeFrame: Undertaken during ultrasound assessment 1 (before training intervention) and during ultrasound assessment 2 (which will occur 10 minutes after the training intervention was undertaken). Each assessment will be 15 minutes in duration.
Locations:
Study officials:
affiliation: University of Nottingham
name: David W Hewson, MBBS
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: