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Young Surgeons Need Our Help

Several months ago I wrote about some young surgeons and how talented they were. I gave credit to their experience with video games and wrote that their eye-hand coordination would make them better surgeons than I ever dreamed of being. All they needed, I stated, were a few thousand cases under their belts to give them the experience to match their talents.

Initially, I received e-mails complimenting my astuteness. Later, one person grabbed my ear and whispered to me, then another, and yet one more, as though they were revealing a dark secret. I had identified only the cream of the crop, they told me, and I had neglected to champion the young surgeons who were struggling to get it down. Some advice came from older surgeons, but much more came from industry representatives who witness these young surgeons trying to get their cataract cases done in less than an hour.

It brought back memories of applicants for staff positions in my practice who bragged that they occasionally did a cataract operation in only 40 minutes. I had humored them with a smile, while thinking to myself that unless things changed, they were destined to perform cataract surgery as a hobby rather than as a profitable enterprise.

Experienced Surgeons Have Altered the Training Scenario

What's the problem with their training? I am the problem, and people like me. We are people who perform a lot of cataract and refractive surgery, very efficiently and with low complication rates, but in specialized surgery centers where a lot of residents cannot go. To compound the problem, we have made our facilities accessible to patients who would have been treated at the clinics in the past. So, by taking away the patients and taking away the learning experience, we make training new surgeons more difficult. There's no question about it; when it comes to training the next generation, if we don't wear the black hats, we at least sport charcoal chapeaux.

Having been tagged as part of the problem, I feel obliged to use our resources to lend a hand. We carefully designed two excellent fellowship programs for our practice, one track for cataract surgery and another for laser and lens refractive surgery. We're looking for our first applicants now. Wish us luck because we're putting a lot into this.