Objective To assess the acquisition of basic laparoscopic skills of Medical students trained on a surgical simulator.Methods First- and second-year Medical students participated on a laparoscopic training program on simulators. None of the students had previous classes of surgical technique, exposure to surgical practice nor training prior to the enrollment in to the study. Students´ time were collected before and after the 150-minute training. Skill acquisition was measured comparing time and scores of students and senior instructors of laparoscopic surgeryResults Sixty-eight students participated of the study, with a mean age of 20.4 years, with a predominance of first-year students (62%). All students improved performance in score and time, after training (p<0,001). Score improvement in the exercises ranged from 294.1 to 823%. Univariate and multivariate analyses identified that second-year Medical students have achieved higher performance after training.Conclusions Medical students who had never been exposed to surgical techniques can acquire basic laparoscopic skills after training in simulators. Second-year undergraduates had better performance than first-year students.

There was a significant retention of the laparoscopic surgical skills developed. Even 1 year after a short training session, medical students without previous surgical experience showed that they have retained a great part of the skills acquired through training.

Learning through distributed practice is effective and should be integrated into a MIS postgraduate course curriculum for acquisition of core skills.

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