Students’ interest in surgery affects laparoscopic practicing performance

Background and Objective: Earlier exposure to laparo-scopic techniques is thought to be beneficial for medical students. Reports have demonstrated that practice im-proves performance in laparoscopies. In this study, we intended to evaluate whether medical students’ interest in surgery is affected by the amount of practice and the performance on a laparoscopic simulator. Methods: A laparoscopic simulation curriculum was in-troduced at Taipei Medical University, Wan-Fang Medical Center. Study participants included 36 sixth-year and 14 seventh-year students who were divided according to whether they had indicated an interest (group A) or not (group B) in surgery. The students had twice-a-week practice sessions for 2 weeks. They underwent baseline measurement (BM) before training and posttraining mea-surement (PTM). Self-guided practice on the simulator was allowed. The learning outcomes were assessed com-paring the BM and PTM scores by using the interquartile range (IQR) test. We also tested the correlation between total score and number of self-guided practice sessions. Results: All study participants showed improvement. No differences were observed between BM and PTM scores and between 6th-and 7th-year medical students. Signifi-cant differences were found in PTM scores between groups A and B (P .001). Analysis of variance with a post hoc test for different groups revealed that the PTMs were significantly higher for both the 6th-and 7th-year medical students in group A than for those in group B (P.001). Total performance scores were improved with a higher number of self-guided practice sessions. Linear regression analysis demonstrated a significant correlation between the number of self-guided practice sessions and total performance score (P .001). Conclusion: Those clerks and interns interested in surgery who had more sessions for self-guided practice, displayed more improvement than those not interested in surgery did. Improvement in performance correlated highly with trainees’ number of self-guided practice sessions.