Getting surgery experience

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Sillouetta

MWU CVM 2018
7+ Year Member
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Hey everyone,

I am currently just a first year vet student, so maybe it is too early to even be thinking about this. Our school will be providing us with a decent amount of spay/neuter experience. But what about spenectomy or gastropexy or cystotomy procedures etc. I am currently looking into the RAVS program for spay/neuter experience. Any ideas of where a vet student can begin to gain clinical skills for those more advanced procedures?

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Any ideas of where a vet student can begin to gain clinical skills for those more advanced procedures?

Yeah. Get a lot of experience with spays and neuters.

I understand where you're coming from, but honestly, soft-tissue surgery is soft-tissue surgery to some extent, and you are gaining clinical skills for the 'more advanced' procedures when you're doing them. (And honestly, I'd argue that none of the procedures you mentioned is technically more advanced than a spay - they're just not as common.) You're making a mistake if you're thinking "meh, a spay is a basic procedure, I want to learn to do a gastropexy or splenectomy!"

Yeah, there's specific things to know about any procedure - where to make your incision for an enterotomy or gastrotomy... how to close your cystotomy... where to clamp/cut for your RnA... where and how to attach the stomach in a pexy... whatever. But in general, as a first year student, you should just focus on basic surgical skills: how to maintain sterility, how to tie a good knot, basic suture patterns, good tissue-handling skills to minimize trauma, etc. If you master all the basics, - and unless you already have some professional surgical background, you probably haven't - something like a pexy down the road will seem more straightforward. So something like RAVS (or any of the other similar programs) is worth it, even if you think it's "just" spays and neuters. Make sense?
 
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Cadaveric surgeries are great for honing those skills at first. My school does quite a few cadaver labs for us. If we want "real" experience with those procedures, we are expected to do so once we are on our own, I guess. Some people get to do things like that on externships, but it depends on the vet you extern with. Classes several years ago got to do them on live animals as part of the curriculum, but now that terminal surgeries are a thing of the past it would be difficult to impossible to arrange for large groups of students to practice those soft tissue procedures on clients' pets. We spay and neuter shelter pets, but you can't do an R&A on a shelter dog just because you want to practice. Sometimes those things come through our soft tissue surgery service and we get to assist, but since vet schools are tertiary referral centers mostly, it's usually crazier stuff than Pexies and R&As.
 
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