End of the fellowship
It is with real regret that we say goodbye to Dr Mirek Karel, an orthopaedic surgeon from the Netherlands, who has completed a twelve-month fellowship with Dr Kenneth Cutbush and Dr Ashish Gupta.
His work during the year
Dr Karel has been closely involved in the research programme. A publication reporting a series of 300 arthroscopic Latarjet procedures is planned, which would be a substantial series for this technically demanding operation. He has also written a book chapter with Dr Gupta.
He begins a new fellowship in July 2024 with Dr Tjarco Alta and Dr Arthur van Noort.
What a twelve-month fellowship involves
A fellowship is undertaken after specialist orthopaedic training is complete and concentrates on one area of the field. Over twelve months a fellow works through operating lists, clinics and research with the surgeons hosting them, operating under supervision with increasing independence. The length matters: a full year is long enough to see the same patients from assessment through surgery and into recovery, rather than meeting them at a single point. Individual results vary.
Fellowships are also the usual route by which surgical technique moves between countries. A surgeon who spends a year in one unit and then a further period in another takes the detail of both into their own practice, and most surgeons' operating reflects several such influences rather than one.
Why written work matters
Reporting a consecutive series of patients treated with one technique is how a unit puts its own results in front of others to be examined. A series cannot establish that one operation is better than another, but it can describe what happened to a defined group of patients, including complications and further surgery, which is what other surgeons need in order to assess the technique.
A book chapter does something different. It sets out the current state of a topic in one place for surgeons and trainees coming to it, which requires reading the whole of a literature rather than one part of it. Both are useful, and the work of producing them is a substantial part of what a fellowship year involves.
Related information
See also our post on Dr Wu Kang and Dr Mirek Karel, and our shoulder instability page. See also our shoulder fellowship, research and publications pages.