BERKELEY, CA (UroToday Inc.) - It is well recognized that weekend courses alone do not provide community urologists with the necessary skills and confidence to incorporate laparoscopic renal surgery into their clinical practice. Other investigators have shown that at best 50% of urologists attending laparoscopic courses will be performing laparoscopic renal surgery 5 years following their training. In an effort to improve this rate of "take" the educators at this institution offered mentoring to all urologists participating in their hand assisted laparoscopy (HAL) courses over an 8-month period of time. The courses included 25% didactic and 75% porcine laboratory experience. The mentoring entailed actually scrubbing in and assisting the training surgeon by one of the training centers expert surgeons or a surgeon well experienced in laparoscopic renal surgery at the trainees center.

Surgeons who completed the course and underwent mentoring were more likely (93%) to perform laparoscopic cases after 6 months of follow-up than those who were not mentored (44%). While this study is limited by its retrospective pattern, short follow-up and questionnaire recall bias, it does support the impact of mentoring on urologists clinical practice patterns in laparoscopic renal surgery. It is often challenging to provide credentialing and medical liability coverage for the mentors, depending on the region or state. However, it is less complicated when the mentor is licensed within the same state as the trainee. Mentoring does provide a useful adjunct to postgraduate urologic training and the integration of the challenging laparoscopic skills into the community based practice of urology. Hopefully this report will inspire other centers involved with post-graduate education in minimally invasive urologic surgery to provide mentoring as part of the training curriculum.

J Urol 172: 286-289, July 2004.