ArticleBMC medical education2024
Training technical or non-technical skills: an arbitrary distinction? A scoping review.
Article in BMC medical education, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparison of Error Rates in Technical Skills and Contextual Skills in a Large-Scale Peer-Assessed Clinical Skills Examination.Medical science educator · 2026Article
- Learning gain of an ATLSEuropean journal of trauma and emergency surgery : official publication of the European Trauma Society · 2026Article
- Identifying novel indicators of non-technical skills derived from operative video annotation.The British journal of surgery · 2026Article
- From mannequins to humans - are manual therapy motor skills transferable? A mixed-methods study.BMC medical education · 2026Observational
- Development of clinical teaching competency framework and scale for physician teachers in China: an exploratory sequential mixed methods study.Medical education online · 2025Article
- Building Safe Emergency Medical Teams with Emergency Crisis Resource Management (E-CRM): An Interprofessional Simulation-Based Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Soft skills in dental student curricula: an evidence and gap map.BMC medical education · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionMedical education often aims to improve either technical skills (TS) or 'non-technical skills' (NTS) and how these skills influence adverse events and patient safety. The two skill sets are often investigated independently, and little is known about how TS and NTS influence each other. In this scoping review, we therefore aim to investigate the association between TS and NTS.
methodWe conducted a scoping review of four databases in order to summarize, analyse, and collate findings from the included studies.
resultsIn total, 203 of 2676 identified studies were included in the final analysis. The first study was published in 1991, but the majority of studies were published in the last decade. The majority were intervention studies including 41 randomized controlled trials. The the objective structured assessment of technical skills (OSATS) was the most common assessment tool with strong validity evidence within TS, but many variations without validity evidence were used. Conversely, Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons (NOTSS) was the most used tool with strong validity evidence for assessing NTS. However, the majority of studies used non-validated self-assessment tools to investigate NTS. The correlation between TS and NTS was assessed in 46 of 203 studies, whereof 40 found a positive correlation. DISCUSSION: Our findings echo previous literature suggesting that empirical literature investigating the interaction between TS and NTS lack methodological depth. In this review only a minority of the identified studies (n = 46) investigated this correlation. However, the results strongly indicate a correlation between TS and NTS skills, suggesting that physicians who are proficient in their NTS, also perform well on their TS. Thus, the distinction between them in learning designs may seem arbitrary. While this result is promising, the limited methodological rigour indicates a lack of proper understanding of NTS and how to properly assess them.
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