Editorial: Special issue on teaching and training

2090-598X 2014 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Arab Association of Urology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aju.2014.01.003 Surgery is no longer what we knew it to be. Rapid technological and medical developments, and especially a changing infrastructural, political and ethical environment, have changed the face of modern surgery. This puts more and novel demands on the surgeons and the surgeons-to-be. When we were asked by Professor Shokeir to put together another special issue for the AJU, being endourologists what first came to our minds were all sorts of sub-speciality issues. Then we asked what could connect all urologists worldwide. Not only that, but what connects them with the rest of the surgical community, and with associated co-operating specialties? The answer is simple: training. The training to do the right thing for the right patient at the right time, in the context of urology, surgery, and medicine in general. All of us are in training. Training does not stop with graduation, or even a professorship. Training and learning is a lifelong process. Some still learn when they look immediate death in the eye. Trainees need to learn how to master the skills required, and then how to become teachers themselves. Teachers have to learn how to become better teachers, not least by listening to the trainees. In surgery, over centuries the training and teaching followed the apprenticeship model. However, the increasing accountability of surgeons, increasing patient awareness, and reductions in working times for surgeons and trainees in an attempt to achieve a safer work environment and a better worklife balance, have made this model unsuitable for modern training and teaching in many parts of the world. In addition, new learning concepts are continuously evolving and often cross traditional borders between trainer and trainee, surgery and other medical specialties, and even extra-medical professions. What has been good for centuries does not necessarily mean that it cannot be improved. Trainers and trainees can learn from each other, as can surgeons from anaesthesiologists, or even from other high-risk professions such as airline pilots. In this issue we tried to bring together all these aspects of training and teaching, from concepts to practice, from the trainees view to the trainers view, from the educationalist to the practical urologist. We believe that this special issue might not only be of interest to trainers, but for all of us, as we all keep learning and we all should be keen to understand how we do it, how others do it and how we can improve our current beliefs and standards.