Surgery Course....What does your school do?

[CVM2012]

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Hi everyone,

My question to you all is about the differences in how "Surgery I" was taught at your school? I am a third year student, and am in the process of trying to figure out a way to get the students at my university more surgical experience.
Currently, each student does 1 spay and 1 neuter (both survival surgeries) during our Surgery I course. We don't have any access to cadavers ahead of time for practice, so those 2 surgeries are about the extent of our surgical/suturing experience prior to going into clinics.
I was just wanting to survey people who are attending or have attended other schools to get an idea of other programs out there.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[twelvetigers]

Granted, I'm not the most qualified person to answer this, but... does your school have a shelter rotation during 4th year? If so, doesn't that include lots of spay and neuter surgeries?

Alternately, there are some spay and neuter programs you can do if you're interested in traveling. Worldvets, VIDA, organizations like that. Of course, these can be expensive, so perhaps someone can offer some insight on how to possibly make junior surgery (or surgery I) more involved for the students.

 

[Nexx]

We get roughly the same amount of experience as you have described. It however depends on availability of animals. For instance I only did one cat castrate this year, but my Sx partners have had both a dog spay and neuter each.

We've also done a terminal surgery on a pig (involving laparotomy/enterotomy/enterectomy). Also we have done a rumenotomy and vasectomy on a sheep/ram (non-terminal, also not medically necessary - good aftercare including analgesics provided however and rumenotomy sheep become new farm stock for us)

Next year we get to do a spay clinic day during rotations, but again what we get depends on animal availability at the time.

For extra experience many of us do clinical placements (i.e. externships of which we are required to do 13 weeks) and may try to find clinics that let us perform/assist with surgery.

 

[sumstorm]

all our required surgeries are survival.

Surgery I is fall semester, 2nd year. We also have surgery both semesters 3rd year. Also, many of our selectives have surgery, as do several of our clubs (survival) so you can start doing school sponsored surgery fall semester 1st year.

Our first surgery course divides us in teams of 3. each team will be responsible for 3 neuters and 3 spays on dogs. We rotate surgeon, assistant, and anesthetist. If there are additional issues that need to be addressed such as cherry eyes, dewclaw removal, hernia repair, hepatoportal shunts, etc...students remain scrubbed in and assist or perform the procedure under the direction of a sugeon.

The school also offers S/N clinics through our shelter med program where volunteers can get volume experience.

Surgery is definitly something you can get alot of experience with if you want it at our school. The required stuff is spay/neuter and blocks. We also have a lot of wet labs (and a surgery club) for things like flank spays, orthopedic surgery, etc.

 

[alliecat44]

Our school is much like yours--in fact, I started a similar thread on this last year because I had the same line of thinking!

We do surgery in fall of junior year. Two dog surgeries--most get one spay and one neuter (I was lucky enough to get two spays, and some classmates were unlucky enough to get two neuters). In large animal surgery, one person out of the four in your group gets to castrate a horse and there's an optional cow C-section lab (again, one person in your group is the surgeon and it's only done once). In LA surgery, we did have one cadaver lab where we each chose two procedures from a list including flank laparotomy, dehorning, digit amputation, enuculeation and got to perform them on small ruminant cadavers.

At our school, there is no shelter medicine or spay/neuter rotation. In fact, if you want to go the "local" spay/neuter clinics (I think the closest one is 45 minutes away), they require the student to pay (I think it's about $200 a week).

Personally, I took one week of my elective coursework and spent it at a very worthy non-profit high-volume high-quality spay/neuter clinic in Texas and did 6-8 surgeries a day for a week. It helped tremendously, though it's too bad to have to go so far afield.

 

[Angelo84]

At Tufts in the required curriculum you do two spay surgeries. When you are on surgery in clinics you may end up doing a spay or neuter but chances are you won't get to. We have several elective options one is a week long spay/neuter how many procedures you do a day depends on the demand. There is also a combined elective week where you do medicine/optho/dentistry/ER for four days and then spay neuter on Friday. There is also a high volume feral cat clinic that you can be involved with depending on your clinic schedule (ie on a rotation that you are totally off that day so no on call, morning treatment/procedures).

 

[Braki]

I can't comment so much on third year as I just started first, but in first year we have a course called Basic Surgical Skills. You learn to identify instruments, how to tie a good square knot, and how to do suture patterns. They then test you on it (this course is pass/fail). I think the reasoning is that it gives you more experience in first year, helps to keep the curriculum interesting and clinically relevant, and by the time you're in third year you don't have to spend time learning patterns and doing knots and can focus on the more challenging things.

 

[No Imagination]

At MSU we start Surgery I and II sophomore year, and every student does 3-4 (survival) spay and/or neuters (and assists as anesthesiologist) for 6 - 7 others. While it certainly is a lot of stress, especially at first, its an incredibly well run system. We get our dog, do complete PE; run all our own labs, write scripts (which obviously have to be signed off by an rDVM), workup our drug calcs, pre-med, induce, and do the surgery.

A bunch of DVM's and 3-4 years wonder around to help out if we need it. If for no other reason, I love MSU for the amount of hands on experience we get.

Any specific questions, just ask.

 

[rustysmom]

At Michigan State (the other MSU 😀), our operative surgery class is in the fall of 3rd year. We do 4 spay/neuter surgeries as our survival surgeries - they can be dog spay, cat spay, or dog neuter. We're split into groups of 3 and rotate through surgeon, assistant, and anesthestist. The techs in charge of determining which group does what surgery are good about making sure each group gets something different - my group has done a dog neuter, cat spay, and dog spay. We have lots of faculty, residents, and 4th years wandering around to help us in our survival surgeries.

All of the rest of our surgeries are on cadavers. We are expected to treat these as recovery surgeries with appropriate patient prep, scrub, gown, glove, drape. We've done abdominal explores with spays and splenectomies, fracture fixation, intestinal resection, amputation, enucleation, and cutaneous reconstruction so far. We have an FHO/MRIT on a cadaver and our last spay/neuter left this semester. I definitely feel the cadaver labs have helped me to feel more confident in a recovery surgery. We didn't start the survival surgeries until mid-October after we had a refresher from our principles class in the spring (learn to gown, glove, drape, etc) and some cadaver surgeries.

For other opportunities, we also have a spay/neuter rotation, spay/neuter weekend clinics, and a spay/neuter 3-week summer trip that you can participate in. You can also go down to the hospital at any time to shadow a clinician and scrub into surgery.