Low Cost Surgical Simulation Models

Abstract

What if a surgeon’s first attempt was on you? Surgical residency lives up to every stereotype of being an extreme challenge, even for the brightest of doctors. Fresh out of medical school, their medical education is still far from over and they must grapple with the challenge of tests turning from paper and pencil to scalpel and skin. Residents will see hundreds of different surgeries, needing to assist and understand all of them in detail. Drinking information from the proverbial fire hydrant is nothing new, but now real patients are involved, and each mistake is costly. It is one thing to learn when making a mistake only results in a poor grade, but in this case, each mistake the residents make could be life threatening to their patients. With stakes this high, it begs the question of how can we improve the training of surgical residents while still keeping costs affordable for medical schools. The Brody School of Medicine has allowed us the opportunity to implement our low cost surgical simulation models into the surgical curriculum, allowing us to give residents training that correlates with what they are learning and seeing.