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angles. between hand surgery experience in years and accuracyMETHODS Seventy-one staff members from five plastic and reconstructive surgery units were recruited. These con-sisted of 11 Occupational Therapists (OT), 15 Physio-therapists (PT), 12 Senior House Officers (SHO), 23 Specialist Registrars and ten Consultants. Each was required to complete a simple questionnaire prior to testing which recorded their hand surgery experience in years, whether they were regular goniometer users and whether they had a special interest in hand surgery. The volunteers were then required to visually estimate the positions of the metacarpophalangeal and interphalangeal joints of all five digits of a resin cast of an adult male hand (Fig 1). was performed using Spearman Rank Correlation. A value of Po0.05 was considered significant. RESULTS The demographic characteristics of the volunteers are shown in Table 1. The majority of the occupational and physiotherapists had a stated interest in hand surgery as did seven of the ten consultants. However, only a third of the surgeons routinely used a goniometer, compared with the majority of the therapists (Po0.05). The results of visual estimation, in percentage error for all the fingers (combined) and thumb, are shown in Table 2. There were minor differences in observer accuracy between the individual fingers but all groups were significantly better at assessing the thumb (Po0.003). All groups were also significantly better atGONIO