A Questionnaire-Based Study to Evaluate the Benefits of Summer Internships for Anesthesia Technician Intern Training in Turkey

Internship Programme of Anaesthesia Technicians

Abstract

BACKGROUND:  Quality training of anesthesia technicians must be high. To provide this crucial high quality, summer internship programs are important.  

This questionnaire-based study aimed to evaluate the benefits of summer internships for anesthesia technician intern training in Turkey.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: The study was approved by the ethical committee. An internet questionnaire on Google docs was formed containing participants’ demography data, internship applications and their observations. Finding standard questionnaire to investigate technicians’ training is difficult; we create a form to investigate our purpose.  The descriptive and cross-sectional study included anesthesia technician students and graduates who did summer internships in Turkiye. Questionnaire was replied by 1,179 technicians.

RESULTS: The average age is 23 ± 4.87 years. 84.4% of the participants are women and 77.8% work for 0-1 year. Only 89.2% of the participants did an internship, and 97.8% thought that a summer internship was necessary. Essentials trainings like intubation (39.1%) and monitoring (15.5%) were never performed by nearly half of the technicians. The preparation of alternative airway devices was the least performed application (0.3%). As other applications were in low percentages, these findings could not be accepted as success.

 CONCLUSION: In literature, to our knowledge, there isn’t a standard evaluation scale for anesthesia technician training. Thus, we could not define success or failure of internships precisely. However and because of lacking applications in various percentages, we speculate that it is difficult to explain internships as success. To solve this problem, success criteria and “critical numbers” for “training success” must be validated.