Oct. 22, 2014 | “Our main goal is to expose them early to show them they can do it,” said Ruth Thomas, M.D., professor of orthopaedic surgery and director of the UAMS Center for Foot and Ankle Surgery.

Thomas looks around at the 40 high school girls from all over the state getting a hands-on glimpse into the life of an orthopaedic surgeon on Oct. 4. The students were a part of the Perry Outreach Program designed by the Perry Initiative and hosted by UAMS. The initiative works to inspire young women enter the fields of orthopaedic surgery and engineering.

“I think it’s a great program,” Thomas said over the sounds of drills and mechanical saws. “We’re hoping that as we introduce them to the program, they’ll develop an interest that they’ll hang on to.”

Women make up 4 percent of all board-certified practicing orthopaedic surgeons. The Perry Initiative hopes their nationwide effort will eventually raise that number.

 “Women just need early exposure to orthopaedics to gain interest in it,” said Dana Gaddy, Ph.D., professor of physiology and biophysics and orthopaedic surgery.

Thomas and Gaddy organize the workshops at UAMS. The workshops also include a session to expose first- and second-year female medical students to hands-on practice of orthopaedic procedures. UAMS was the first school in the country to include medical students in the Perry workshop.

“Medical students typically only have one week of exposure to orthopaedic surgery during their third year, which is hardly enough time to get a feel for what the career involves,” Gaddy says

“The medical students need early exposure, and we are happy that we can provide students with clear role models of local women orthopaedics surgeons who are faculty from UAMS and the VA”, Gaddy says.

 “UAMS proudly supports women in Orthopaedic surgery and has successfully graduated 14 women from residency training, with another woman in training now”, Thomas said.  

During the day-long session for the high school students, the young women used surgical power tools to drive nails or attach external fixators to repair bone fractures, performed ACL ligament replacements, and repaired fractures with casting materials. They worked on bone replicas made to reproduce the actual weights and densities of real human bones to demonstrate to students that women can physically do the work of an orthopaedic surgeon.

“You can see the confidence builds as the day goes on,” Gaddy said. “In the morning we explored anatomy with cadaver arms. They were hesitant at first to see how the tendons and muscles affected movement of the hands. But by the time we finished, they were all wanting to touch and feel and get a better understanding.”

This is the fourth year for UAMS to host the program.

“Our enrollment has gone up every year,” Thomas said. The first year we had about 25 students. There were 35 last year. This year we have 40.”

In 2012, The Perry Initiative chose UAMS as the inaugural site to host the Medical School Outreach Program. The program’s success has enabled the program to expand to other sites including the University of California in Berkeley, Calif., the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis and New York University.

The workshops were sponsored by the UAMS College of Medicine and the Graduate School, the Arkansas Biosciences Institute and Medtronic Inc., one of the world’s largest medical device companies.

Jenni Buckley, Ph.D., an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware, and Lisa Lattanza, M.D., a board-certified orthopaedic surgeon and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the University of California at San Francisco, founded The Perry Initiative.