Factors Associated with the Innate Orthopaedic Ability of Veterinary Students

Relatively little is known about the innate surgical ability of veterinary undergraduates. The objective of this study was to investigate if there were differences in the innate surgical ability of a cohort of 142 third-year veterinary undergraduate students to perform a series of simulated orthopaedic surgical tasks, and whether specific factors influenced their innate ability. Participants performed four simulated surgical tasks; ‘depth of plunge’ – an assessment of the ‘plunge’ depth through foam when drilling through the trans cortex of a PVC pipe; ‘3-dimensional drilling’ – an assessment of accuracy when drilling through a block of wood; ‘depth measurement’ – an assessment of the ability to correctly measure the depth of holes in PVC pipe; and ‘fracture reduction’ – where the speed and systematic reduction of a simulated fracture was assessed using a rubric score. Performance for each of these tasks was compared based on the responses to a survey. Results showed considerable variation in the innate ability of students. Previous experience performing manual tasks and using a drill was associated with an improvement in students’ ability to perform one of the four tasks (fracture reduction). Age, gender, handedness, videogame experience, building game experience, exposure to orthopaedic surgery, or desire to pursue surgery as a career were not associated with the performance of any of the tasks. A learning curve was observed for the depth of plunge task. An increased target angle led to decreased drilling accuracy for the 3D drilling task. The innate ability of veterinary students to undertake simulated surgical tasks was largely unaffected by the previous experiences we evaluated.