Trained medical students can effectively assess surgical quality

Trained medical students demonstrated excellent reliability in evaluating minimally invasive right hemicolectomy videos, achieving an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.885. When combined with expert colorectal surgeons’ scores, the inter-rater reliability increased to 0.945. These trained students accurately identified lower quality surgeries, while untrained students assigned higher scores to poorer quality surgeries. The findings suggest that medical students, after proper training, can contribute to objective assessments of surgical quality alongside professionals.