Completing the observership
Dr Radhakrishna Kantanavar has completed his observership with the Brisbane Shoulder Fellowship and QUASR.
Pictured, from left to right: Christopher Child, orthopaedic surgeon, Switzerland; Mirek Karel, orthopaedic surgeon, Netherlands; Ken Cutbush, Brisbane Shoulder Fellowship Co-Director; Hean Wu Kang, orthopaedic surgeon, Ireland; Ashish Gupta, Brisbane Shoulder Fellowship Co-Director; and Radhakrishna Kantanavar, orthopaedic surgeon, India.
What an observership is
An observership is a period spent with a surgical unit watching how it works. The visiting surgeon attends operating lists, clinics and departmental meetings, but does not operate. It is shorter than a fellowship and carries no service commitment, which makes it possible for surgeons already established in practice elsewhere to take part without leaving their own patients for a year.
The value of it lies in detail that is difficult to obtain any other way. Published papers describe what was done and what followed. They do not describe how a theatre list is set up, the order in which the steps of an operation are taken, how a clinic decides which patients should be offered surgery, or how a unit follows patients afterwards. A visiting surgeon sees all of that over a few weeks. Individual results vary.
Why units host visiting surgeons
Hosting is not one sided. A surgeon who has trained and practised in a different health system asks questions that regular staff no longer think to ask, and brings different solutions to problems the unit has long treated as settled.
Observerships and fellowships are also the usual beginning of longer collaborations, including joint research and later exchanges of trainees between units. A visit of a few weeks is often the reason a multi-centre study becomes possible several years later.
The programme and the research unit
The Brisbane Shoulder Fellowship is the structured training programme described on our fellowship page, and QUASR is the shoulder research unit that works alongside it. Visiting surgeons spend time with both, which means seeing the clinical work and the research that informs it in the same visit rather than separately.
Related information
See also our earlier post on Dr Radhakrishna Kantanavar, and our shoulder fellowship, research and publications pages.