AMPATH Surgical Cookbook

The AMPATH Surgical Cookbook takes the World Health Organisation's Essential Surgical Procedures and streamlines learning them for the Medical Officers, Interns, and Clinical Officers who are performing emergency surgical tasks with few resources and over-stretched supervision across Africa and the world. Our modules break tasks down into basic steps, with a visual recipe, and a curriculum based on mastery blocks- mini-skills with imaging and video education as well as micro-models that allow that portion of the procedure to be repeated until mastery is achieved.  Mental Imagery training takes the learner to the next level, at no added expense, and allows for improved self-assessment and AI and crowd-sourcing allow for additional feedback.

Our module combines mental imagery training with technical skill decomposition to improve performance.

Each module begins with guided meditation to direct a novices attention.

Task deconstruction is used to break procedures down into a "recipe" with easy to understand tasks and clear accompanying visuals. Multimedia educational materials complement this curriculum, which utilizes movement decomposition, action observation, action imitation and cognitive task analysis. 

The technical curriculum for each procedure is broken into mastery blocks- micro-skills with accompanying micro-models that allow that portion of the procedure to be repeated until mastery is achieved.  

Feedback begins with guided reflection, assisted by artificial intelligence with computer generated correction, and is finally supplemented by crowd-sourcing.

We selected our psychomotor skills as those necessary for performing the World Health Organisation's Essential Surgical Procedures. A needs assessment survey of surgical and reproductive health residents across Subsaharn Africa identified those procedures for which Medical Officers and Interns feel the most need for additional education.

In our region, the bulk of medical care is provided by practitioners without specialty training. In emergency situations there may be little option for transferring patients to referral facilities with specialists and additional resources. In this setting, essential surgical care is often provided by Medical Officers, Interns, and Clinical Officers with less training and supervision than would be ideal. Our modules will be a resource specifically aimed at bolstering the educational resources of these practitioners. A secondary audience would be surgical registrars or consultant surgeons who need refreshing or refinement of their surgical skills, but for whom training resources are more readily available.

Our team includes many members who have practiced as Medical Officers and have intimate personal knowledge of the needs of these practitioners and the patients they serve. This knowledge is now coupled with advanced surgical training which has allowed insight into their former practice of surgery and they ways in which this could have been improved.

Our team is led by Dr. Ivan Seno and Dr. JoAnna Hunter-Squires, general surgeon colleagues practicing and teaching at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya.

Clinical team
Philip Okoth, MBBS
Andrew Wainana, MBBS
Winfred Kimani, MBBS
Anna Gillio, MD
Manisha Bhatia, MD

Education team
Gary Dunnington, MD
Dimitrios Stefanidis, MD, PhD
Dimitris Athanasiadis, MD
Dom Doster, MD, Surgical education fellow
Amelia Rogers, MD, Surgical Education Fellow
Edward Hernandez, MD
Sally Mitchell, EdD, MMSc

Technical Team 
Jeff Levy, MD, CEO CaseNetwork
Nicolas Anton, Mental Imagery Specialist

AI experts. Engineers.