ER Surgery Workshop: Showing children what it's like to be a surgeon
The Edinburgh International Science Festival is an annual two-week event that engages audiences with science and technology. The Wellcome Trust, together with Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, sponsored the ER Surgery Workshop, a popular event held at the 2010 festival.
Each workshop was a 40-minute session with a medical student, where children could investigate and ‘operate’ on manikins. The realistic manikins had a variety of injuries or surgical requirements that required treatment, such as a shattered knee or gallstones. The medical student in attendance explained the science behind the various conditions, and surgical procedures such as wound cleaning, taking blood, keyhole surgery and endoscopy. The children then used real surgical equipment to treat the 'patient'.
The children got to try removing gravel from a deep leg wound, extracting bone shards from a knee injury with keyhole surgery, removing gallstones from a gall bladder, and taking blood, among other tasks. As the children were in small groups for this event, each child was able to get involved, and then shared the tasks between them; for example, when removing the gallstones, an endoscopy into the abdomen was performed while one child held the gall bladder open and another removed the stones.
The children were able to get first-hand experience in the workings of an operating theatre, and were able to ask the medical student any questions they might have. They learned while having fun and reinforced the information by putting theory into practice. Nearly 1200 children experienced the event over the course of the Festival.
This project was funded by the Wellcome Trust People Awards scheme.