Cooperative Physicians Help the Cause
Once DeBarr has the scenes cut together in a preliminary format, she consults again with the attending physician to make sure the flow of the video is correct. Fortunately, she says, CU’s attending surgeons and house staff are more than willing to work with her on the productions.

“This process takes a lot of time out of the doctors’ schedules,” says DeBarr. “But they’ve been so enthusiastic and helpful about everything — we really appreciate their cooperation. One of our attending physicians made a comment that he’s going to make every resident watch the videos before they can walk into the O.R. to scrub with him ... so I thought that was a good sign!”

Reduced Training Time, Increased Efficiency
Spotnitz echoes that sentiment. He says CU will be tracking the progress of its video-trained surgeons, to determine what effect the tapes have had on students’ learning. But he says the immediate benefits are clear.

“If, for example, someone who’s learning to do a procedure has carefully watched a video,” explains Spotnitz, “he or she will already know the basic functions illustrated. The total time needed to train that person could be dramatically reduced — by as much as half if he or she has done the homework. So for us, Final Cut Pro is an incredibly valuable tool.

“Reviewing these programs,” Spotnitz adds, “lets us see practices that could be improved ... so that’s educational for our faculty as well as our house staff. It’s great to have a teaching instrument that’s endorsed by our faculty, that gives us a common starting point, in terms of how things should be done.”

The Ideal Teaching Tool
Students now view the videos via password-protected access to CU’s website. But Spotnitz is currently evaluating the possibility of publishing the entire series on DVD. No matter what form the programs take, Spotnitz predicts that Final Cut Pro will continue to be an integral part of CU’s future training efforts.

“We’d love to be able to give our interns a ‘video textbook,’ and say ‘go home and watch these before you come into the O.R.,’” says Spotnitz. “That would save even more time, that could then be devoted to other training with our house staff. Plus, if the interns could review these videos again and again, it would only increase our patients’ safety by setting uniform standards for all procedures. There’s a major move in medical education in this country towards the use of video. Final Cut Pro makes it possible for us to provide high-end video training to our students, at a very reasonable cost.”

	Advice to Other Schools Plan well; have the objectives of your videos clearly defined. Determine how to fund personnel, cameras, media, and computers. Define a system for securing all necessary consents. Make a list of procedures to be taped, and the key points to be covered in each program. Recognize that video production requires considerable teamwork, from patients to doctors to videographer. Be aware that you’ll probably need to film the same procedure several times to get it right.