A comparison of the success rates of resident and attending strabismus surgery

Abstract

Residency training involves surgery by resident surgeons at various levels of experience and proficiency, supervised by an experienced attending physician. We reviewed the results of strabismus surgery performed at four institutions with two residency training programs. Five hundred twenty-two cases with follow up greater than 6 weeks were evaluated. These cases included 315 attending procedures and 207 resident procedures under direct attending supervision. Success was defined as a strabismic deviation of 8 prism diopters or less. Average postoperative follow-up was 57 weeks and did not differ between groups. There was no statistical difference between the resident success rate of 58% (121/207) and the attending success rate of 69% (217/315) after adjusting for population differences. The average final deviation of the patients postoperatively was 7 delta for the attending group and 10 delta for the resident group. Amblyopia was significantly more frequent in the resident cases (P < .001). Adjustable sutures were used significantly more often in attending cases (P < .0001). This study supports the premise that resident strabismus surgery is as successful as attending surgery.