Learning by Doing

Tufts Now All Stories

Hannah Donnelly, V17, was “super anxious” about a dog spay she was scheduled to do. All third-year students at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine are required to spay two dogs for their course in small-animal anesthesia and surgery.So when she got an email offering students a chance to practice on a simulator as part of a pilot study, she promptly signed up. “Basically, surgery is a series of steps you have to learn by doing,” she said. On her simulated surgery day, she practiced in real-world conditions. She scrubbed in, picked up her scalpel, made the tiny incision in a model dog and cut through layers of “skin.” She placed her sutures and extracted the replica ovaries. And when it was over, those precise surgical steps felt coded into her muscle memory, she said.
When the time came for the real thing—a dachshund from a local shelter—she felt totally prepared.
“Practice makes perfect,” Donnelly said, noting that working on the simulator gave her dexterity and self-assurance. “You need to be confident as a veterinarian,” she said, “and anything you can do to build up confidence is a good thing.”
The school’s new Multipurpose Teaching and Simulation Laboratory will do just that. It will house a variety of life-sized simulation animal models on which students will practice their clinical and surgical skills. The centerpiece will be a surgical training lab. The facility is in the design stage, and money is being raised to build it.
Cummings School is part of a national movement at veterinary schools to expand simulation training, much like medical and dental schools have already done, said Nick Frank, professor and chair of clinical sciences, who is leading the working group that the school’s dean, Deborah Kochevar, has charged with reimagining 3,000 square feet of space in the Henry and Lois Foster Hospital for ...

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