Surgical students are less capable than their forebears, due to spending too much time with screens and not enough with physical materials. These claims, from Imperial College London鈥檚 professor of surgical education Roger Kneebone, were widely reported this week. But it鈥檚 not clear that this is really the case.
According to Kneebone, today鈥檚 students lack the manual dexterity that鈥檚 important for sewing, cutting and stitching. He argues that this is because, instead of taking part in creative subjects that involve working with their hands聽during their education, 鈥渁 lot of things are reduced to swiping on a two-dimensional flat screen鈥�.
There hasn鈥檛 been much research yet into the effects of smartphones on hand skill, but found no statistically significant change in digital dexterity, and a significant improvement in reaction time, among frequent smartphone users.
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Small positive effect
If anything, says Pete Etchells, a psychologist at Bath Spa University, UK, the use of digital technology 鈥� rather than smartphones specifically 鈥� seems to be linked with a higher level of surgical skill.
One , for example, found that young surgeons who played a lot of video games made fewer errors in surgery and worked faster than those who didn鈥檛. A found that surgery simulators were less effective at training surgeons than just letting them play on games consoles. These were small studies that only found small effects, warns Etchells, but they don鈥檛 paint a picture of digital technology damaging the core skills of surgery.
More broadly, says Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute, Kneebone鈥檚 concerns and the surrounding coverage are part of a wider reaction to the role of technology in our lives. Around a decade ago, we hoped that digital experiences could lead to improvements in various kinds of real-world competence, such as brain-training games to improve cognitive performance, or video games to improve manual dexterity. 鈥淎s those hopes haven鈥檛 materialised we, rightly, feel disillusioned,鈥� says Przybylski.
Hi-tech surgery
There is also a society-wide fear about new technologies, which in many cases is unfounded. Przybylski鈥檚 own work has found that, contrary to widespread concern around technology and young people, screen time seems to have a small positive effect on teenagers in all but the most extreme of cases. 鈥淐ollective anxiety about the role of smartphones, and social media companies, feed into this sort of technophobia,鈥� he says.
Ultimately, it may turn out that Kneebone is right, and that the decline in craft and handiwork at school is reducing the quality of the surgical student intake. But if so, there doesn鈥檛 seem to be much evidence of it yet. 鈥淚 have not noticed any great difference in the dexterity of the medical students or junior doctors I come into contact with,鈥� says Susan Hill, vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons.
In fact, it鈥檚 probably a good thing that our youngest surgeons are digitally literate. In the very near future, 鈥渁 surgeon鈥檚 ability to interact with technology 鈥� be that surgical robots or augmented reality 鈥� will become increasingly important,鈥� says Hill.
