Practice and perfect your suturing skills, so you don’t have to practice on your patients.

Learning to suture wounds and lacerations takes a real understanding of wound-care theory and the basic principles of suturing, plus enough practice at knot tying and suturing to reach genuine proficiency. This hands-on, self-paced online course is paired with The Apprentice Doctor® Suturing Kit, which includes the instruments and materials you need. You’ll work through more than 50 lessons and hands-on projects.

The Apprentice Doctor® Suture Course and Kit are not a substitute for clinical training. They give you a firm foundation and a chance to get through the initial learning curve in a simulated setting, so you walk into the real clinical situation with confidence.

Work through the sections in order and get each one right before moving on. The basics look simple, but they’re the building blocks everything else depends on.

What’s inside the course

1. Preparation

Get your tools and practice setup right: attaching suture material to a needle, loading the needle holder, preparing imitation skin, and building a rod to practice knot tying on.

2. Surgical knot tying

The foundation of every stitch:

• Square knots, and why a granny knot fails
• Two-hand and one-hand ties
• The surgeon’s knot
• Instrument ties

3. Principles of wound care

The theory you need before you close anything: what a wound actually is, the surgical considerations that guide repair, the “LACERATE” approach, and how wounds heal.

4. Suturing techniques

The hands-on core, one technique at a time:

• Subcutaneous, interrupted, and interrupted sutures with buried knots
• Continuous and continuous interlocking sutures
• Horizontal and vertical mattress sutures
• Far-and-near, figure-eight, subcuticular, and purse-string sutures
• Correcting a “dog’s ear” and unequal tissue levels
• Removing sutures, other wound-closure methods, and home care of a closed wound

5. Complications and specialized suturing

What can go wrong and how to recognize it: stitch tear-through, wound dehiscence, stitch abscess, inversion and hypertrophic scars, keloids, stitch marks, crosshatching, and wound contracture. Plus a look at specialized suturing.

6. Final assessment

• Section quizzes throughout
• A theory and a practical final assessment

Who should enroll

For medical school, premed, dental, medical assistant, veterinary, and nursing students, paramedics, military medics, and qualified healthcare professionals brushing up on a foundational skill.

Setting

Online and self-paced.

Duration

About 30 hours, including the practical projects.

We recommend you don’t rush it. Keep to about three hours a day so each topic has time to settle. With full-time study you could finish in under a week, but spacing it out works better for what you actually remember. Before each session, take a few minutes to review the previous day’s work.

Requirements and instructions

— Register with Apprentice Doctor Academy

— Enroll in the course

— Get the Suturing Kit (optional, but you’ll need it to complete the practical projects and practice the techniques you learn)

Certified credits

Counts as the equivalent of thirty shadowing hours.

One half academic credit per 80 hours of courses taken. Transcript available upon request.

Warnings

– The course and accompanying kit (including all items and instruments in the kit) are for education and training only. No instrument or item may be used in a real clinical setting, emergency or otherwise.

– Without a formal medical qualification, using these techniques on the public can expose you to medico-legal action.

– The surgical gloves contain latex. Latex-free gloves are available on request.

– Adult supervision is recommended for students under 18.

Click here to order your Apprentice Doctor® Suturing Kit