Baseline urologic surgical skills among medical students: Differentiating trainees

Abstract

Introduction: Urology training programs seek to identify ideal candidates with the potential to become competent urologic surgeons. It is unclear whether innate technical ability has a role in this selection process. We aimed to determine whether there are any innate differences in baseline urologic technical skills among medical students. Methods: Second-year medical students from the University of Toronto were recruited for this study and stratified into surgical and non-surgical cohorts based on their reported career aspirations. After a pre-test questionnaire, subjects were tested on several urologic surgical skills: laparoscopy, cystoscopy and robotic surgery. Statistical analysis was performed using chi-squared test, student t-tests and Spearman's correlation where appropriate. Results: A total of 29 students participated in the study and no significant baseline differences were found between cohorts with respect to demographics and prior surgical experience. For laparoscopic skills, the surgical cohort outperformed the non-surgical cohort on several exercises: Lap Beans Missed

A Systematic Review of Virtual Reality Simulators for Robot-assisted Surgery

“…The review identified two dVSS cohort studies that assessed innate surgical ability among medical students [38,48]. One of these is also the only validity study in which participants executed all 26 basic core tasks of the Mimic software (Table 4) [38].…”

Urology technical and non‐technical skills development: the emerging role of simulation

“…Urology trainees are not currently selected based on their technical expertise or manual dexterity. Gupta argues that the technical skills of aspiring trainees can be assessed in areas such as laparoscopy, robotics, and cystoscopy [2]. However, the definition of technical competence continues to be debated and few studies identify standard approaches that differentiate competent vs non-competent performers [3].…”