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Suggestions for surgical practice for students

Hey, we (the students) are organizing an event called "Surgical courses" in our university, during which we introduce other students to surgery and help them to improve their surgical practical skills. So far our courses consisted of:
- surgical knot tying and sutures (simple suture, running suture, mattress suture and so on). Done with real expired sutures on sponges or pig skin.
- basic plastic surgery techniques - z-plasty, skin flap, rhomboid and others. All done on chicken skin
- Vascular surgery techniques - anastomosis "side to end" and "end to end" on synthetic vessel substitutes
- Abdominal surgery techniques - side to side and end to end anastomosis using pig intestines obtained from the slaughter house.
As you can see we are mostly using the materials that we are able to acquire ourselves and do not have the access to expensive surgical simulators etc. So what I am asking is:
Perhaps you could suggest other ways to simulate surgical procedures and improve our practical surgical skills. What are other surgical procedures that are possible to at least partly simulate, and from other surgical fields as well (neurosurgery, traumatology etc). Are there ways to cheaply create some sort of laparoscopic simulators? Are there some sort of exercises for surgeons/residents/students to develop and improve their hand dexterity/motor skills?
Your help would be appreciated :smile:
Original post by Kranas
Hey, we (the students) are organizing an event called "Surgical courses" in our university, during which we introduce other students to surgery and help them to improve their surgical practical skills. So far our courses consisted of:
- surgical knot tying and sutures (simple suture, running suture, mattress suture and so on). Done with real expired sutures on sponges or pig skin.
- basic plastic surgery techniques - z-plasty, skin flap, rhomboid and others. All done on chicken skin
- Vascular surgery techniques - anastomosis "side to end" and "end to end" on synthetic vessel substitutes
- Abdominal surgery techniques - side to side and end to end anastomosis using pig intestines obtained from the slaughter house.
As you can see we are mostly using the materials that we are able to acquire ourselves and do not have the access to expensive surgical simulators etc. So what I am asking is:
Perhaps you could suggest other ways to simulate surgical procedures and improve our practical surgical skills. What are other surgical procedures that are possible to at least partly simulate, and from other surgical fields as well (neurosurgery, traumatology etc). Are there ways to cheaply create some sort of laparoscopic simulators? Are there some sort of exercises for surgeons/residents/students to develop and improve their hand dexterity/motor skills?
Your help would be appreciated :smile:


For laparoscopic surgery you can very easily make your own simulator with just a box and a camera. You will need to buy the instruments of course but these can be picked up quite cheaply.

You can also try and gain sponsorship from companies, for example earlier in the year we organised an orthopaedic conference for which orthofix provided us with 6 external fixators and sawbone models.

You also don't need to necessarily provide workshops solely on techniques used in theatre. If you go to your local teaching hospitals plastering department they will almost certainly have an excess of old equipment which you could use to organise a session on, for example, short arm casts.

Tendon repair is also quite an easy workshop to organise and is usually very enjoyable. You can usually pick up pigs trotters for 50p a piece.
Reply 2
Do you, as medical students, actually have the skills to teach this stuff to other students?
Original post by Helenia
Do you, as medical students, actually have the skills to teach this stuff to other students?


Presumably the OP will be making use of the local trainees, particularly if the society they allude to is their universities surgical society.

This is the assumption i made with my suggestion

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