All UK medical schools reach final of Surgical Skills Competition

In this year’s RCSEd Surgical Skills Competition for medical students, every medical school in the UK was represented by a finalist – a total of 43! This was yet another first for this fantastic competition, which is one of the jewels in the crown of the College’s very busy year of events. Even more notable was that in 2025 we also had our first female champion, Laura Saunders from Queen’s University Belfast. President Professor Rowan Parks smiled even more broadly as he handed the winner’s trophy to a student from his alma mater.

When I took over organising the Skills Competition from the inimitable Roger Currie (also a previous editor of this publication), I was keen to reframe the game to emphasise the learning of new skills. We know that surgical skills are needed in all walks of medical life, not just in the operating room, so teaching students how to handle tissue, hold forceps, steer needle holders and manipulate a suture correctly are important in many specialties. Equally, surgeons are made, not born, and I have been praying that some of our students will have found that ‘light-bulb moment’ when they realise they can perform a new skill, particularly if they thought they previously couldn’t! I think this might be the ‘secret sauce’ of the competition. Students who progress to the second round are sent a ‘skills wallet’ with instruments, sutures and wound training pads. They are encouraged to practise, practise, practise on their own or in groups. I think it is this ‘discovery phase’ that may convert a surgical sceptic into a student who may start to think about a career in surgery – the ‘secret sauce’!

The College is incredibly grateful to our sponsor Medtronic which, once again, funded the competition. It should be rightly proud of its role in nurturing the next generation of surgical talent. Much of surgical innovation comes from industry – think energy devices, surgical staplers, robotics, capsule endoscopy – so it is right that we work closely together to ‘engineer the extraordinary’, be it people or technology.

There were more than 1,300 applicants to this year’s challenge. The competition starts with a surgical quiz that includes a personal statement. Five semi-finalists are chosen from the highest-scoring entries from each medical school and these students are sent the skills wallet. We ask the students to look at a skills video that the College has curated, but we also point students towards our colleagues who run the Black Belt Academy of Surgical Skills (BBASS), which is a College-endorsed skills academy (see pages 8–9). The students then take and upload three short videos (filmed on their mobile phones) to the College servers, where they are marked by volunteer Fellows. This group of people are the unsung heroes of the competition because they spend time objectively marking more than 600 three-minute films. Our thanks go to these markers.

The finalists are the top-scoring medical student at each medical school, an accolade that is already something to be proud of. They are invited to the College in Edinburgh, where they are hosted for one night in Ten Hill Place, the College’s hotel. There is a ‘goody bag’ waiting for them on their hotel bed. All the students get together for a meal the evening before the competition and this is where more ‘magic’ happens: the bonds of friendship start to form between students who are sharing a common journey. It’s great to witness! The College generously supports all travel and accommodation.

On the Saturday morning, the students are divided into two groups. While one group is touring the College’s award-winning museum, the other is put through its paces on a 10-station OSCE-style skills competition. The stations comprise a mixture of tests, including suturing, laparoscopic skills, tendon repair, external fixation of bone fractures and combat tourniquet application. The last two stations have been inspired by humanitarian trips to Ukraine and Gaza with one of our College partners, UK-Med.

The stations are manned by volunteers, who are a mixture of Regional Surgical Advisors and members of RCSEd Council, and we are very grateful to them for giving up their Saturday to nurture the next generation of surgeons.

The grand final may look like an OSCE but the emphasis is definitely placed on having fun, engaging with fellow students and with the surgeons looking after the stations. The atmosphere in the Wolfson Hall reflects this and there is a real buzz in the room during the competition.

The Convener for the day was Adeline Clement, a consultant orthopaedic and hand surgeon in Inverness (and RSA for the North of Scotland), who managed the grand final like clockwork. By her side was Una Curran, who has helped mastermind the skills competition with me over the past five years. Adeline and Una mustered the students together for a celebratory lunch and prize-giving. Laura Saunders was the Champion, Poppy Fletcher from the University of Plymouth was the runner-up and Matthew Hough from Keele University took third place.

The photograph (opposite) of the finalists around Kenny Hunter’s sculpture, Your Next Breath, reflects the diversity of our entrants. In a month when the Surgeons’ Hall Museums launched a two-year project celebrating women in surgery, A Fair Field and No Favour, it was gratifying to see another skills competition first – a majority of female finalists. I am convinced that Alice Mabel Headwards-Hunter and Caroline Doig would have approved.

It’s always a challenge to improve on a winning formula. Each year we get very valuable feedback from students and faculty, which shapes the following year’s competition. However, this competition likes to innovate, be it 3D-printed ‘human-like’ tissue for student practice, to placing a combat tourniquet on an exceptionally lifelike traumatic amputation model. Where will we go next?