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ADVANCED LAPAROSCOPIC & TECHNOLOGY PRECEPTORSHIP
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Six Weeks of the most thorough exposure to advanced laparoscopic and bariatric surgery for surgeons who desire to be leaders in the future of health care

New and exciting ways of performing surgical procedures are rapidly emerging.  The revolution that started in 1989 with the laparoscopic cholecystectomy has the potential to affect all procedures that have traditionally been performed in the open setting.  Unfortunately, we have a very large problem.  This revolution of laparoscopic surgery has totally exposed the deficiencies in our historical technique for surgical training.  The lack of a standardized skill acquisition and validation program, no targeted objective based performance goals, and the absence of a supervised enforced skills acquisition curriculum and training program are glaring shortcomings that we much overcome.  This void has left surgery far behind the power curve in the utilization of technology in providing more cost effective and global surgical health care.  This innovative fellowship will help to produce cybersurgeons that are totally proficient in this new and exciting era of health care.  These Jedi Knights are able to not only perform minimally invasive procedures but, in addition, are able to train others and deliver services to a wider geographical area.

In 1969, when man landed on the moon, not one surgeon in the US was consistently

using a computer on a daily basis for health care.  Today, the surgical community is still adopting technology at a snail's pace.  There is a need to asses our current knowledge and skill transfer algorithms.  Also, the proliferation of the use of technology by surgical health care providers should be a high priority item.

Our current training programs are not outfitted to train individuals in minimally invasive surgery and establish a working knowledge of cutting edge technology.  More importantly, the residents that lead these programs are not qualified to teach others.  There have been efforts to develop and design laparoscopic fellowships to train the leaders of tomorrow, but these programs last as long as a year and are generally in an unstructured environment that leads to inefficiencies in knowledge, judgment and skill transfer.  It is not realistic with the economic pressures that physicians face to expect them to sacrifice one year of their lives for further study.  Also in countries in great need, this one year of educational exile can leave the needs of the country unaddressed.