Using gamification to increase resident engagement in surgical training: Our experience with a robotic surgery simulation league

At Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, NY, the entire general surgery residency program was gamified, with all residents split into teams via a “draft” and competing for points allotted for assessments of various core competencies.7 We hypothesized that gamifying robotic surgical simulation would be effective in increasing the engagement of urology residents and improving proficiency with simulation exercises, so we created a robotic surgery simulation league competition. Ultimately, we believe that formalizing a robotic simulation training rubric will accelerate training, standardize competency across training environments, and advance research to the end of maximizing gain from virtual reality training for robotic surgery. In our experience, in addition to improving resident familiarity with and skills on the surgical robot, training games were fun and helped to build camaraderie across training classes.Declarations of competing interest All authors declare no conflict of interest.