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

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

This questionnaire-based study evaluated 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 observations. Finding a 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. The questionnaire was replied to by 1123 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 a summer internship was necessary. Nearly half of the technicians never performed essential training like intubation (39.1%) and monitoring (15.5%). The preparation of alternative airway devices was the least performed application/practice(0.3%). As other applications were low percentages, these findings could not be accepted as successful.

 CONCLUSION: In the literature, a standard evaluation scale for anesthesia technician training must be used. Thus, we could not define the success or failure of internships precisely. However, we speculate that it is challenging to explain internships as successful because of needing more applications in various percentages. To solve this problem, success criteria and “critical numbers” for “training success” must be validated.