Teaching technical skills using medical simulation: a new frontier

As a medical student, I remember clearly the first time a surgeon gave me a needle driver and forceps and asked me to “sew” the fasciae of an abdominal incision. The closure was clumsy, tentative, and being left-handed, I could not easily open the driver which is designed for a right-handed person. The surgeon summarily removed the instruments from my hand and commented that it was good I wanted to be a surgeon because I could use the training! He said I needed to practice. This proved to be somewhat of a problem since I could not improve without being allowed to stumble through some portion of an operation.