AUGUSTA, Ga. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- How do you learn to do major surgery without actually doing surgery? By 2010, nationally accredited medical schools will be required to have hands-on programs to prepare students for increasingly complex procedures before they actually go into surgery. No patients are needed for these operations -- it's all virtual reality.
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Third-year medical student Rebecca Poole-Ward knows it will take more than reading 1,000-page medical textbooks to make her a great doctor.
"I want to be able to take the information in my head and make my fingers do what I read about," Poole-Ward, a student at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, told Ivanhoe.
Today, Rebecca is learning surgical techniques by actually doing them. A few steps away, medical student Nick Capito is doing a gastroscopy, and surgical resident J.B. Bittner is finishing up a vascular procedure.
This is Medical College of Georgia's virtual education and simulation lab. Here, thanks to computer science, high-tech virtual training modules give students and residents hands-on experience doing surgical techniques from knot-tying to laparoscopy -- without actually going into surgery. It's virtual practice that can lead to real-life success in the OR. Students say it's the next best thing to the real thing.
"It's as close as you're going to get, and it's definitely better than seeing a picture," Poole-Ward said.
Instructors say this "practice makes perfect" approach is paving the way to better doctors, safer surgeries and improved outcomes for patients in the future.
As medical procedures become more complex and high-tech and more procedures are done laparoscopically, medical school instructors say virtual reality learning will be more and more important to prepare medical students for the real-life experiences ahead.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
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How do you learn to do major surgery without actually doing surgery? By 2010, nationally accredited medical schools will be required to have hands-on programs to prepare students for increasingly complex procedures before they actually go into surgery
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