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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.