Development and Validation of Metrics Lumbar Labor Epidural Catheter Placement

Procedural skills play an important role in anaesthetic expertise. More focused training and assessment of procedural skills will be needed in the future as training moves from an apprenticeship based training system to competency based assessment. Currently various techniques exists to assess procedural skills of anaesthetist. For epidural catheter placement, task specific check list, global rating scales and cumulative sum techniques have been developed and validated. These techniques aim either for better qualitative outcome sacrificing objectivity or rely on self-reporting. A decrease in objectivity in turn hampers inter-rater reliability which is an essential component of a valid assessment model. Checklists type assessments force the developer to comprehensively characterize the procedure of interest and then validate the completed procedure characterization. This approach has been quantitatively shown to have higher assessment reliability levels compared to Likert-scale assessment. The objective of the project is to develop and validate a comprehensive procedure characterization for labor epidural catheter placement. Another objective is to compare this new assessment tool with existing checklist and global rating scale for labor epidural to establish concurrent validity.5 A well-developed objective, validated procedure characterization serves as a master tool which has multiple applications. It helps to build a training programme for the procedure, allows providing metrics based feedback to trainees using simulator, helps to assess the performance of trainees and in future might be used as benchmark to allow competency based progression in the training.