Navigating the Path to Surgery: A Systematic Review of Early Surgical Exposure Programs for Preclerkship Medical Students in North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To review the structure, outcomes, and impact of early surgical exposure programs for preclerkship medical students in North America, and to evaluate their role in influencing specialty choice, surgical skill development, and professional engagement. DESIGN: Systematic review conducted according to PRISMA guidelines, with a preregistered protocol (PROSPERO: CRD42024588099). Data were synthesized narratively due to heterogeneity in study designs and outcomes. SETTING: Studies were conducted primarily at single institutions across the United States and Canada, typically within academic medical centers offering undergraduate medical education. PARTICIPANTS: Fourteen studies met inclusion criteria, comprising preclerkship medical students enrolled in accredited North American medical schools. Inclusion required programs to be at least 2 days in duration and contain a minimum of 2 educational components (e.g., mentorship, operating room shadowing, procedural skills training, or simulation). RESULTS: Participation in early surgical exposure programs was associated with increased interest in surgical careers (8/12 studies), improved perceptions of surgery, and greater preparedness and performance during surgical clerkships. Mentorship emerged as a key factor influencing professional engagement. Technical competence and confidence improved across multiple surgical skills (e.g., suturing, knot-tying, OR familiarity). Students consistently reported high satisfaction with the early surgical exposure programs, especially when engaged in hands-on activities. CONCLUSIONS: Early surgical exposure programs offer educational and professional benefits, including enhanced surgical interest, skill development, and mentorship. These findings support broader integration of such programs into undergraduate curricula to inform career decision-making and address workforce needs in surgery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".