Background: The advent of minimal access surgery is fast changing the trend of surgery in the past two decades. The benefits, safety, and efficacy of this type of surgery to the patient are enormous and the extent is still being discussed. Laparoscopy surgery requires expertise and its skills acquisition had a long learning curve. Introducing this to the medical school curriculum will enable the medical students to be well acclimatized to the procedure as well as shorten the learning curve before they qualify as specialist medical doctors. This study aimed to assess the knowledge, attitude, perception, and extent of exposure of the penultimate medical students to the minimal access surgery and the need to be added to the medical school curriculum for the clinical class in Nigeria.
Methods: One hundred and eighteen medical students completed the survey across selected universities in South-West (83.1%), North West (14.4%), and North Central (2.5%) in Nigeria. They are from Federal Universities (32.2%), State (63.6%,) and private Universities (4.2%). We have more female medical students (51.7%) than male (48.3%), Majority of them were below the age of 25 years with an average age of 24 years and they are currently in 500 levels (68.6%) and 600 levels (31.4%). Respondents were in Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department (60.2%), Medicine and Surgery (27.1%) Paediatrics, Community health, and Psychiatry rotation.
Using a stratified sampling method, self-administered semi-structured questionnaires were distributed online to respondents in different Nigerian Universities from August 2022 to January 2023. Data obtained were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0.
Results: Knowledge of laparoscopic surgery among medical students was 94.1% (111). About half of the respondents (53.1%) asserted that laparoscopic surgery services are offered regularly in their hospital. However, the majority are not conversant with the actual cost of the procedure. About 40.7% of medical students have previously participated in or watched a Laparoscopic surgery. A good proportion of these students agreed that Laparoscopic training should be introduced to medical students' school curriculum (91.6%). The topmost reasons they wanted to introduce Laparoscopic surgery training include early exposure to relevant knowledge and skills (94.1%), Promotion of proficiency in minimal access surgery, and world-class standards (70.3%), increased interest in sub-specialties (59.3%) and to improve treatment outcome of patients (50%).
Conclusions: Willingness to accept laparoscopy and inclusion of minimal access surgery training into the medical school curriculum was relatively high among penultimate and final year medical students in Nigeria, hence a high prospect for a laparoscopic surgery practice and more expertise in the field in Nigeria.
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