Reflections from ‘know yourself’ – consultant interview preparation course
Vascular surgery is distinct in four main aspects when compared to almost all other branches of surgery:
- The level of complexity of cases is generally significantly higher than average.
- The age and comorbidities for vascular patients is huge
- There is a high level of potential complications, almost 30-50% of arterial cases will have a complication or more in the first 2 years.
- There is a continuous need for high attention to details ALL the time; one lost opportunity is a guarantee for a complication.
It is not therefore surprising that this branch of surgery:
- Result in a very high level of preoperative stress to the surgeon
- requires a high demand on creative thinking
- requires a huge demand on time, urgent, and duration of procedures.
- s very dynamic and changing
- is full of basic science
- is two specialties in one: surgery and targeted radiology; each requires to apply the 10,000 hour rule to master
- nd is the only surgical specialty that can intimately integrates both physics and physiology
Well .. not everyone is convinced though. This is what Br J Cardiol 2009;16:299–302 has to say:
We undertook a seven-year in-depth review of all reported obituaries of medical practitioners in the BMJ to assess the age and disease distribution of mortality of medical practitioners in order to identify relationships between mortality and discipline, ethnicity and other demographic factors. In total, 3,342 obituaries reported in the BMJ from January 1997 to December 2004 were reviewed.
The majority of obituaries were of male doctors. Doctors who qualified in the developed world appeared to live longer (mean age at death of 78 years) than those who qualified in Asia (mean age at death of 70 years). White-European doctors lived significantly longer than doctors from other ethnic groups. There was no significant difference in longevity between doctors working in the primary care sector and those in the secondary care sector. An eighth (12.5%) of doctors died between the ages of 60 and 70 years and, of these, nearly half died between the ages of 61 and 65 years. There were significantly more suicides and accidental deaths in Accident and Emergency (A&E) doctors compared with other specialties.