Introduction: Exposure to orthopaedics has been shown to positively influence medical student perceptions of the field; however, fewer than half of medical schools require or even offer an orthopaedic rotation as part of the core clinical curriculum.We hypothesized that a mandatory rotation during the clerkship year would counteract stereotypes about the field.Therefore, we sought to characterize the perceptions of orthopaedic surgery before and after such a clinical rotation at our institution.Methods: Over a 2-year period, we administered an anonymous survey to all 320 medical students completing our mandatory 1-week orthopaedic surgery rotation.We received 267 prerotation and 153 postrotation survey responses.Students were asked for their sex, age, race/ethnicity, and "three words that describe your perception of orthopaedic surgery."These words were categorized according to theme and positive/negative connotation by the study team and evaluated for association with medical student demographics.Results: The most frequent prerotation words were "bones" (10.1% of words), "intense" (6.5% of words), and "bros" (6.4% of words).The most frequent postrotation words were "bones" (6.2% of words), "fun" (5.9% of words), and "intense" (2.9% of words).The percentage of negative and neutral words decreased after the rotation (negative: 27.5% to 14.1%; P , 0.001; neutral: 50.2% to 38.3%; P , 0.001), whereas the percentage of positive words increased (21.3% to 47.4%; P , 0.001).Positive words increased postrotation for both men (23.4% to 54.7%; P , 0.001) and women (20.9% to 40.5%; P , 0.001), whereas negative words decreased for both men (20.1% to 10.4%; P , 0.001) and women (34.2% to 17.6%; P , 0.001).
Huffman et al. (Fri,) studied this question.