How much surgery you learn in training often comes down to luck: where you rotate, who is teaching that day, and whether there's a simulation lab you can actually use. Many people reach their first procedure knowing the steps only from a textbook. I did.
Medical schools have grown, and clinical training sites are harder to find. US medical schools took in 52% more first-year students in 2018 than in 2002. That year, 85% of MD schools said they were concerned about the number of clinical training sites1.
The gap follows you into residency. In their last six months, US general surgery residents were rated as operating near-independently in only one in three cases of the most common operations, cholecystectomy included2. In the UK and Ireland, fewer than half of surgical trainees had simulation training where they worked3.
We can't give you more cases. We can give you more repetitions of what you need to know before one: the order of the steps, the anatomy that matters, and the safety points, like getting the critical view of safety before you clip.
That's what Campo Cirúrgico is for. It's a PC game you play with a mouse, a controller or a tablet. You repeat a procedure until the basics stick, and your mistakes show up in a report instead of on a patient. It doesn't replace patients or supervisors.
It's still in development. Join the list to follow the testing and vote on what we build next.
Sources
- AAMC. Results of the 2018 Medical School Enrollment Survey, July 2019, pp. 1 and 14. First-year MD and DO enrollment: 19,567 in 2002–03 and 29,746 in 2018–19.
- George BC et al. Annals of Surgery, 2017;266(4):582–594. 10,130 procedures rated by 444 attending surgeons in 14 US programs.
- Nicholas R et al. International Journal of Surgery, 2019;67:94–100. Survey of 323 surgical trainees in the UK and Ireland.
