Surgical Quality Assessment (SQA) offered by the Amsterdam Skills Centre

Surgical quality assessment (SQA) is key to securing the best clinical outcomes of surgery. To assess the quality of surgery, Amsterdam UMC, Amsterdam Skills Centre and ALEA Clinical Services have worked together since 2016 to build a digital platform to upload clinical data, diagnostic images and video recordings of surgical procedures. Assessing the surgical procedure employing competency assessment tools developed in partnership with Imperial College London, allows rating of the surgery and enables correlating outcomes to surgical quality.

In clinical surgical trials, uniformity and quality control of surgeries are essential to properly evaluate effectiveness of novel procedures. The SQA Amsterdam platform is successfully used for the quality assurance and data collection in the global COLOR III trial which encompasses more than 1,100 patients. Other trials such as the Right study and the TIGER trial are also working with SQA (Right, COLOR 3, and TIGER).

The Amsterdam Skills Centre is committed to teaching cutting edge surgical procedures and is pleased to introduce the innovative SQA platform. This platform provides a unique opportunity to measure the impact of training courses by rating videos of surgeries performed before and after the training course. Continuous surgical quality audit and accreditation are other valuable applications of the SQA platform.

If you have further questions or you are interested in using the SQA platform, please contact Dr. Alexander Grüter (a.gruter@amsterdamumc.nl), Dr. Jurriaan Tuynman (j.tuynman@amsterdamumc.nl) or Dr. Jaap Bonjer (j.bonjer@amsterdamumc.nl).