Developing protocols for managing digital videos of surgical procedures

There are many benefits to video recording surgical procedures. Recordings provide a lot of data that could be used to:

• Improve research
• Innovate
• Assess outcomes
• Ensure quality
• Educate

All of which benefit patient safety and care.

Currently, however, few surgeons and centres routinely record surgical procedures. This is due, amongst other reasons, to the complexities of getting patient consent, issues with acquiring, transferring and storing data as well as information governance risks and concerns about litigation.

It is these complexities and issues we aim to understand during this project.

Project aims

The aim of this project is to develop a draft ‘master protocol’ for collecting, transferring and storing digital videos of surgical procedures, with a focus on their use for research purposes.

What we hope to achieve

During this project we will work to:

• Understand how surgical videos are currently being collected and stored across NHS centres
• Understand barriers, challenges and solutions to video collection, transfer and storage from the perspective of all stakeholders
• Use the information gathered above to develop provisional national policy and protocol documents ready for testing in a future implementation study