Introduction: In the last years the adoption of new different technologies together with the modification of our clinical practice and an increase concern about patients’ safety changed the training surgical scenario which could not be further managed with the traditional approaches. Therefore, recently many centers start to develop standardized training pathway for the surgical skills learning. Nevertheless, the scenario is still very asymmetric through all the European countries. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current status of surgical training across Europe and how it is perceived by residents and young urologists Methods: We created a 64-item, online-based survey in accordance with the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys (CHERRIES) and designed with the platform http://www.surveymonkey.com (Survey Monkey, Portland, OR, USA). The survey was spread in May 2022 via EAU mail list to YUO, Junior membership, and other urologists under 40. Baseline characteristics assessed were as follows: gender, position, type of center, type of surgical approaches available in their center, the presence of training infrastructure, participation in courses, how the training is organized and satisfaction of their training program. The level of satisfaction was assessed by using a Likert-5 scale. Results: We submitted our survey to 375 participants, with a completion rate of 82% (308/375). 75% of them were male. 50.6%, 31.7% and 17.6% were young urologists, senior and junior residents, respectively. The major part of participants worked in academic centers (70%). Concerning the dry lab training centers, only the 50.9% of participants have one in their center. The 91% of the dry lab training centers are focused on laparoscopy and only the 23.5%, 36.9% and 20.4% involved open, robotics or endourology, respectively. The availability of virtual and wet lab training centers is even fewer and around 31% and 17%, respectively. The surgical training was performed directly on the patients in 94%, 74%, 36% and 94% cases for open, laparoscopy, robotics and endourology, respectively. Moreover, in less than 25% of cases the training program was carried out by using a well-defined standardized training program with preclinical and clinical modular training. Finally, the 49.7% of participants reported satisfaction rate of the training program of 4 or 5 points. Conclusions: The actual European distribution of surgical training centers is not able to provide a capillary access to standardized training program. Despite a relatively broad distribution of dry lab, the availability of wet lab still remains limited. Furthermore, seemingly the first surgical exposure of these trainees happens on the patient. We hope that this overview is helpful in creating more training centers to enhance the European trainees and improve the urologic training in future. SOURCE OF Funding: none
