Florida Hospital Celebration Health surgeons have a new way of making sure they are mentally primed and ready for surgery.
Video games.
General surgeon Dr. James "Butch" Rosser recently conducted a study which concluded that a six-minute warm-up before simulated laparoscopic surgery preparation made colleagues more operating room efficient.
The experiment was conducted with 300 surgeons. Half played a variety of games including various versions of Sega's Super Monkey Ball franchise on both Nintendo's Gamecube and Wii for six minutes, the other surgeons did not.
"Surgeons who had played video games in the past for more than three hours per week made 37 percent fewer errors, were 27 percent faster and scored 26 percent better overall than surgeons who never played video games," found the study. "It is the error reduction that will have the most significant impact on patient safety."
Medical errors at the hands of surgeons lead to 98,000 patient deaths a year and has an annual yearly cost of $37.6 billion, according to reports.
Rosser used the comparison of an athlete warming up before a game. During his time with the Orlando Sentinel, he spoke to reporters while avoiding obstacles in the game without taking his eyes off the screen as a way to display his slick hand-eye coordination. A specialist in minimally invasive surgical techniques, Rosser holds a bootcamp called the Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills and Suturing Course that has graduated seven thousand plus surgeons since 1992.
"We're trying to be a resource for the world," said Rosser.
The news comes as video games become a hot button topic for politicians who claim a connection between the interactive medium and violent behavior. Recently, 20-year-old Zachary Burgess blamed Grand Theft Auto V for stealing a car while a female passenger was still inside the vehicle because he "wanted to see what it would be like."
Watch the news report below.
