Paul McNamara
The Guardian

PHOENIX (August 7, 2008) -- Unlike most 27-year-old men, Jeff Henke has never owned a videogame console. So after eight years of conscientious swotting to qualify as a doctor it came as somewhat of a shock to Jeff to learn that his homework now includes an hour a night on the Nintendo Wii. "This isn't exactly what I pictured of when I thought of medical school," he says. "But I'm not complaining."

Henke is a second-year resident surgeon at the Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, and for the past year he has been a willing guinea pig in a study measuring the effects on surgeon proficiency from regular gameplay on Nintendo's popular console. And the results are impressive.

"The surgeons develop an increased efficiency, less errors, more fluid movement - basically they're just better," says Dr Mark Smith, director of the hospital's Simulation Education and Training (SimET) Center. To be precise, the doctors who regularly played on the Wii scored 48% higher on tool control and performance than those who didn't.

Read the entire article in The Guardian

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