title: Surgical simulators and simulated surgeons: reconstituting medical practice and practitioners in simulations.
abstract: Simulators that represent human patients are being integrated into medical education. This study examines the use of a haptic-enabled, virtual reality simulator designed to allow training in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) techniques. The paper shows how medical practices and practitioners are constructed during a simulation. By using the theoretical tools that situated learning and communities of practice provide, combined with the concept of reconstituting, I broaden the discussion of medical simulators from a concern with discrete skills and individual knowledge to an examination of how medical knowledge is created around and with computer simulators. The concept of reconstitution is presented as a theoretical term for understanding the interplay between simulators and people in practice. Rather than merely enacting simulator training, reconstituting creates a different context, different actors and different techniques during the simulation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Technology and Social Change, University of Linköping, Sweden. erijo@tema.liu.se
authors.forename: Ericka
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction; D013502:General Surgery / Q000193:education; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional; D016544:Patient Simulation; D013514:Surgical Procedures, Operative / Q000193:education*