The Effect of Metrics Based Performance Based Progression in Provision of Labor Epidural Analgesia

This will be a prospective, randomized, double blind control study. Ethical committee approval and consent from both participating anaesthetist and patients will be obtained.

Trainees will be recruited from Cork University Hospital. Anaesthetic trainees with less than 2 years of experience in anaesthesia and who has performed less than 50 epidurals in the preceding 2 years (not limited to labor epidurals) will be requested to participate in the study.

The trainees will be randomized in to group 1 and group 2. In group 1, standardized conventional teaching and training for labor epidural analgesia will be used. In group 2, they will be trained by metrics based simulation to predetermined level of proficiency. Each trainee will then perform 10 labor epidural catheter insertions and the procedures will be video recorded with patients consent.

Observers blinded to the groups will be used for the data collection, outcome assessment and analysis. Failure rate of epidural will be assessed based on the occurrence of one or more of the following events,

1. Inadequate analgesia at 45 minutes from start of epidural needle placement.
2. Resiting epidural or abandoning the procedure.
3. Accidental Dural puncture.
4. Supervisor take over. The primary end point of the study is to compare difference in epidural failure rates between the two groups. Secondary end point will include assessment of clinical performance using metrics based assessment by two blinded reviewers based on video recordings and patient satisfaction with epidural analgesia. In addition to demographic data of the patients, duration of labor, cervical dilation at the time of insertion of the catheter, length of catheter inserted, time of insertion of catheter, experience of the operator and position of the patient during epidural placement will be noted. Age, sex and anaesthesia experience of the trainees will also be collected.

The estimated labor epidural failure rates for year 1 trainees is 25%.6 We hope to reduce the failure rate in interventional group to 5%. 48 procedures per group will be sufficient to show a statistically significant difference between the groups with p value of 0.05% and power of 80%. To allow for dropouts, 8 trainees per group will be recruited and each will perform 10 procedures making it a total of 80 procedures per group.