Joining the fellowship
Dr Rachel Price is joining the shoulder fellowship programme for twelve months. She is a New Zealand orthopaedic surgeon with international fellowship training.
She will go on to join Capital & Coast DHB, Wellington Hospital, as a shoulder and elbow specialist in 2026.
She has made a strong start to a fast-paced programme, and is travelling to Nepal with the team.
What a twelve month shoulder fellowship involves
A fellowship is post-specialist training. By the time a surgeon starts one they have already completed a medical degree, several years of hospital work, an orthopaedic training programme and the final fellowship examination, and they are qualified to practise. The fellowship year is where a qualified surgeon narrows their practice to one region of the body.
In a shoulder fellowship that means operating lists several days a week on shoulder cases, clinics in which the fellow assesses patients and discusses the plan with the supervising surgeon, and attendance at the unit's research and teaching meetings. Volume matters: a technique that a general orthopaedic surgeon performs occasionally is performed weekly in a subspecialty unit, and it is the repetition across a wide variety of anatomy, including the cases that do not go to plan, that builds judgement. Fellows also teach the registrars and students, and are expected to contribute to research and publication during the year. Individual results vary.
Why surgeons train abroad before taking up a post
Subspecialty fellowships are commonly taken in another country, and there are practical reasons for that beyond the experience of living somewhere else. The number of units anywhere in the world that perform a high volume of one particular operation is small, so a surgeon who wants that concentration usually has to travel to it. Health systems also differ in how they fund, refer and follow up patients, and seeing a second system makes it much clearer which parts of a practice are driven by evidence and which by local arrangement.
Surgeons then take what they have learned back to the hospital they join, which is the main way a technique moves from the few places doing it to general practice. That is why fellowship training in one country routinely shapes shoulder surgery in another a few years later.
Related information
- The shoulder fellowship page explains the programme.
- Dr Price appears in our post on operating at Cairns Base Hospital.
- Our post on the international faculty in Kathmandu.
- The shoulder surgery page.