Are Touchscreens Robbing a Generation of Surgeons of Their Dexterity?

schwit1 shared this article from the BBC:
A professor of surgery says students have spent so much time in front of screens and so little time using their hands that they have lost the dexterity for stitching or sewing up patients. Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, says young people have so little experience of craft skills that they struggle with anything practical. 'It is important and an increasingly urgent issue,' says Prof Kneebone, who warns medical students might have high academic grades but cannot cut or sew. 'It is a concern of mine and my scientific colleagues that whereas in the past you could make the assumption that students would leave school able to do certain practical things - cutting things out, making things - that is no longer the case,' says Prof Kneebone.
The professor, who teaches surgery to medical students, says young people need to have a more rounded education, including creative and artistic subjects, where they learn to use their hands. Prof Kneebone says he has seen a decline in the manual dexterity of students over the past decade - which he says is a problem for surgeons, who need craftsmanship as well as academic knowledge.... 'A lot of things are reduced to swiping on a two-dimensional flat screen,' he says, which he argues takes away the experience of handling materials and developing physical skills. Such skills might once have been gained at school or at home, whether in cutting textiles, measuring ingredients, repairing something that's broken, learning woodwork or holding an instrument. Students have become 'less competent and less confident' in using their hands, he says. 'We have students who have very high exam grades but lack tactile general knowledge,' says the professor.
Interestingly, much of the professor's research is on simulations, according to his web page at Imperial College London, where he leads 'an unorthodox and creative research group' that uses professional actors with inanimate models to create realistic clinical encounters, as well as 'low-cost, portable yet highly convincing environments such as the 'inflatable operating theatre'.'

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