New medical students have spent so much time on
screens that they lack vital practical skills necessary to conduct life-saving
operations, a leading surgeon has warned.
Roger Kneebone,
professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, said that a decline in hands-on creative subjects at
school and practical hobbies at home means that students often do not have a
basic understanding of the physical world.
“Partly it stops [students] being aware in three
dimensions of what’s going on around them, because their focus is much
narrower, but also it takes away that physical understanding you get by
actually doing things,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live. “That has to be done in the
real world with real stuff.”
Kneebone said there
had been a “very serious knock-on effect” on practical skills among students
since smartphones had become so popular.
He said: “We have
noticed that medical students and trainee surgeons often don’t seem as
comfortable with doing things with their hands … than they used to even perhaps
five or 10 years ago.
“People are no
longer getting the same exposure to making and doing [things] when they are at
home, when they are school, as they used to.”
He claimed that
cutting back on creative subjects at school had a negative impact on the
tactile skills necessary for a career in medicine or science.
Kneebone said: “We
are talking about the ability to do things with your hands, with tools, cutting
things out and putting things together … which is really important in order to
do the right thing either with operations, or with experiments. You need to understand
how hard you can pull things before you do damage to them or how quickly you
can do things with them before they change in some way.”
Kneebone said that
by spending time online children were missing out on practical skills acquired
from hobbies such as cooking, woodwork, playing a musical instrument or model
making. He endorsed making Halloween jack-o’-lanterns as a start for budding
surgeons.
He said: “Pumpkin
carving is one example of using sharp instruments with great delicacy and
precision on a hard surface with a soft inside to create something that you
have got in your mind and then you have to make it happen.”
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