Playing Games as Part of the Surgical Training Curriculum

A new study suggests serious computer games can be used to enhance surgical skills, but need to be validated before they are integrated into teaching methods.

Researchers at the Academic Medical Center (AMC; Amsterdam, The Netherlands) reviewed PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and other resources for studies that evaluated digital games for training medical professionals. In all, the researchers identified 25 studies, describing a total of 30 serious games. Many of the games covered team training in acute and critical care and dealt with mass casualty incidents, including nuclear events and hazardous materials. Others covered more specific areas of healthcare, such as training for coronary artery bypass graft (CAGB) surgery, knee joint surgery, and the assessment and resuscitation of patients with burns.

Six of the studies assessed 13 commercially available games associated with, but not specifically developed for, improving skills relevant to the medical profession. They included sports, action, adventure, and shooting games used to help surgeons improve their laparoscopic psychomotor skills. Some games allowed multiple professionals to train simultaneously on one case or allowed one professional to train multiple cases simultaneously. The researchers concluded that serious games can provide crisis resource training, with a large variety of cases, in a relatively cheap, readily available environment that provides a viable alternative to expensive simulators. The study was published in the October 2012 issue of BJS.

“Many medical professionals may still have a rather outdated view of the average gamer as being someone who is too young to vote, afraid of daylight, and busy killing mystical dwarves in their parent's basement,” said study coauthor Marlies Schijven, MD, of the AMC department of surgery. “However, the reality is that the average game player is 37 years-old and there are almost three times as many women using games as boys aged 17 years or younger.”

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