BBC News:
A professor of surgery says students have spent so much time in front of screens and so little time using their hands that they have lost the dexterity for stitching or sewing up patients.
Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, says young people have so little experience of craft skills that they struggle with anything practical.
Fascinating. My kids all grew up as makers, crafters. They grew up sewing, soldering, painting and, in one case, learning how to sew a proper medical stitch.
I believe in teaching these sorts of skills. I wonder if future surgeons will have to take basic craft classes to qualify for medical school.
It will be all robot’s job by then.
I find this really hard to believe. Screen time used to be just staring at a screen; these days, it’s interacting with that screen using gestures. I would expect more dexterity, not less.
Is there a study that backs this up, or is it just someone’s opinion?
True, though equally screen-poking-and-sliding isn’t the same sort of dexterity as even the examples in Mr. Mark’s post.
There’s no “holding a thing and manipulating it through space” in using a touchscreen.
The system doesn’t help – I vividly recall some years ago taking my mother to my local hospital’s ER – and a scrub nurse bitterly complaining that she spent 45 min at a workstation doing data entry for every 15 min of actual patient care. – IN AN EMERGENCY ROOM.
Up in the wards it was worse. You know those U-shaped centralized nurse stations? I would typically find as many as eight nurses sitting at consoles – typically doing data entry – and only one or two actually circulating, attending to patients.
Among all the health care providers I’ve visited over the past decade or so – nearly all have doubled their clerical staffs, put in electronic record system – but their provider staffs have been stagnant or reduced. NONE seem to have grown actual medical personnel.
Yeah, I should be more clear. I could absolutely believe this… with a study. Or I could believe the opposite. With a study.
But one lone voice? Not really sufficient evidence. 🙂