Due to ethical and medical-legal drawbacks, high costs, and difficulties of accessibility that are inherent to the practice of basic surgical skills on living patients, fresh human cadaver, and live animals, the search for alternative forms of training is needed. In this study, the teaching and learning process of basic surgical skills pertinent to plastic surgery during medical education on different inanimate bench models as a form of alternative and complementary training to the teaching programs already established is proposed. 1. Introduction Recently there has been tremendous growth of ambulatory surgical procedures that general practitioners need to perform in order to treat cutaneous lesions [1–3]. In this context, as a large percentage of medical students do not acquire basic surgical skills during their training [4] and most of the general practitioners that perform ambulatory surgeries received no formal surgical training [5], it is necessary to establish a training program to teach and refine the basic surgical skills related to plastic surgery (e.g., to biopsy a cutaneous lesion and to reconstruct the defect by the rotation of a surgical flap) that are essential to perform these ambulatory surgical procedures during medical education [4–6]. Considering that surgical training on living patients (traditional learning) violates ethical and medical-legal aspects, that training on live animals and fresh human cadaver increases the risk of infections, involves high costs and limited access, requires specialized installations, and also contravenes ethical legal aspects, and that using virtual reality simulators involves high costs and restricted access [7, 8], the simulation-based basic surgical teaching on inanimate bench models is becoming widely used [9]. However, to date, it has not been established a teaching program that allows surgical skills to be completely acquired [4, 5], and new opportunities in simulation-based surgical education need to be explored to positively impact quality and safety in surgical care [10]. Among all the surgical specialties, plastic surgery now occupies a negligible component of many undergraduate curricula, and there is much discussion in the worldwide literature regarding if there is a place for plastic surgery in the undergraduate curriculum [11–14]. Moreover, plastic surgery as a specialty is poorly understood by medical students and healthcare professionals [11, 15–18], and one of the important reasons for this is limited and inadequate plastic surgery exposure at undergraduate level [15–17]. Although
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