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Background: Students must be proficient in surgical skills according to General Medical Council and Royal College of Surgeons of England guidelines. If these skills are not appropriately taught, there is a risk of an incoming junior workforce with inadequate surgical skills. This paper aimed to review the literature relating to undergraduate teaching of surgical skills in the UK and summarize future suggested training methods. Methods: The databases MEDLINE, Embase and SCOPUS were searched, and the existing literature relating to methodology of undergraduate teaching of surgical skills in the UK over the past 10 years was summarized. The Medical Education Research Quality Instrument was used to assess research quality. Results: A total of 19 papers were included. Cross-sectional evaluations and survey-based studies highlight a clear deficit in surgical skills teaching in the UK. Medical students are currently unable to fulfil their own learning needs and meet requirements set out by the General Medical Council. This lack of surgical teaching appears to negatively affect student desire to pursue a surgical career. The three main themes for improvement are extracurricular surgical skills days, near-peer teaching and simulation. Each method appeared to improve learning, although no studies utilized medium- to long-term follow-up to demonstrate efficacy and there lacks a clear consensus as to the 'standard' of undergraduate surgical skill education. There was also potential for selection bias and response shift bias in many of the studies assessing pre- and postintervention confidence and opinions. Conclusion: There is a concerning lack of surgical skills teaching that has resulted in medical students and junior doctors not having the necessary surgical skills as per General Medical Council guidance and students feel that their own learning needs are not met. This failure to address the learning deficit may be responsible for the fall in surgical competition ratios. While surgical skills teaching must be improved urgently, more robust evidence is required to evaluate the optimal ways of approaching this issue. Undergraduate medical students must be proficient in certain surgical skills as set out by General Medical Council and Royal College regulations. There appears a deficit in such teaching which we have discussed and attempted to address in terms of alternative methodology reported in the literature that can be used to teach these basic surgical skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction National hip fracture audits share a common heritage in the work of Rikshöft and the Standardised Audit of Hip Fracture in Europe. However, as more countries develop audit programmes and these evolve to address local needs, divergence in the data they collect compromises their scope for learning from clinical, audit and quality improvement work in other nations. Method In 2021 we compared all ten established national hip fracture audits: England/Wales/Northern Ireland; Scotland; Australia/New Zealand; Ireland; Germany; the Netherlands; Sweden; Norway; Denmark; Spain. We tabulated all questions included in each, and cross-referenced them against the 32 questions of the minimum common dataset (MCD) defined by the global Fragility Fracture Network (FFN) in 2014. We identified those consistently used in most national audits, and additional fields that might need to form part of a revised MCD. Any MCD must meet the needs of both developed and developing countries. We presented these findings at the Asia-Pacific FFN meeting, and used an online questionnaire to capture feedback from different countries. A draft revision was presented at the Global FFN conference in September 2021, with feedback again used to finalise this revised MCD. Results We tabulated a total of 215 possible questions. Only 72 (34%) were used in >1 national audit, and only 32 (15%) by more than half of audits. Adherence to the 2014 MCD was disappointing; all 32 fields were used by at least one audit, but 5/32 only by one audit. Only 21/32 (65%) were used in the majority, and only three (anaesthetic grade, operation and date/time of surgery) by all ten established audits. Discussion This revised MCD will help aspirant nations establish new audit programmes, facilitate the integration of novel analytic techniques and greater multinational collaboration, and serve as an internationally-accepted standard for monitoring and improving hip fracture services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]