[Establishment and Evaluation of a Microsurgery Course for Medical Students]

Very few microsurgical courses have been offered for medical students in Germany to date. To raise early interest in this technique, which is essential for plastic and reconstructive surgery, and to guide eligible medical students to choose plastic surgery as their specialist field, the Department of Plastic and Hand Surgery, supported by the Faculty of Medicine of the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, implemented a microsurgical course for students in 2011. This study describes the implementation of that course and evaluates its impact on the subsequent choice of the participants' specialist fields.

Since the summer of 2011, the microsurgery course for medical students has taken place regularly 3 times per term. It is free of charge for participants and is guided by senior physicians of the Department of Plastic and Hand Surgery together with student tutors from the Faculty of Medicine. The arterial end-to-end anastomosis in the fresh chicken leg is used as a training model. Based on a questionnaire survey the participants were evaluated and statistically analysed regarding their course satisfaction, self-assessment of their own eligibility before and after the course, the anticipated future choice of their medical specialist field and how their choice was influenced by this course.

After the successful implementation of the microsurgical course in 2011, a significant number of students were interested in microsurgery. According to the questionnaire, the level of enthusiasm was high among all participants. The self-assessment of microsurgical skills improved significantly after the course compared with the pre-course assessment. In 82% of the participants, the course had a strong positive influence on the future choice of their specialist field.

The regular implementation of a microsurgical course for students in the form described here is practicable and possible without undue personnel and cost of materials. The ongoing interest among students in such an offer is enormous and the satisfaction of the participants is very high. This might be a way to recruit future plastic surgeons by raising early enthusiasm for microsurgery. These future plastic surgeons, in turn, would be given the chance to experience a very fascinating aspect of plastic surgery, which might help them to decide on their specialisation within that field at a later point in their career.