A dinner to mark the changeover
A fellows dinner to say goodbye to Mani Singh, of Kathmandu, Nepal, and to welcome Roberto Pareyon Valero, of Mexico City, Mexico.
Freek Hollman, of Den Bosch in the Netherlands, and Mohammad Jomaa, of Beirut in Lebanon, are staying on. Ridzwan Namazie, of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who trained in New Zealand and is a past fellow, also joined us.
Dr Kenneth Cutbush and his colleague Ashish Gupta look forward to visiting the fellows in their own practices in the years ahead. We are fortunate to have these surgeons working with us.
How a fellowship year turns over
A fellowship is the training a surgeon does after qualifying as a specialist, in order to concentrate their practice on one region of the body. Fellows are therefore not trainees in the usual sense. They have already completed a medical degree, years of hospital work, an orthopaedic training programme and their final examinations, and they arrive able to operate.
Because fellowships run for a fixed term, a unit's fellows change over on a cycle, with some finishing while others are partway through and a new arrival starting. Overlapping them is deliberate. A fellow several months in can show a new arrival how the unit runs, which patients are on the current lists, and where the research projects stand, which means much less is lost each time the cohort changes. A dinner at the changeover is partly social and partly the handover.
Why the network outlasts the year
Fellows come from wherever applicants come from, and in this group that meant Nepal, Mexico, the Netherlands, Lebanon and Malaysia. That has a practical effect while they are present, since each arrives with different assumptions about which patients should be offered surgery and when, and those assumptions get tested against each other over the year.
It has a longer effect afterwards. Each fellow returns to a hospital somewhere and takes the techniques and the approach to planning with them, which is the main route by which a method spreads from the few units using it to general practice. The connections also persist in both directions: joint research that needs more patients than one unit can provide, shared teaching faculty, visits between units, and the ability to ring someone on the other side of the world about a difficult case. Individual results vary.
Related information
- Our post on the fellows reunion at SESA 2022.
- The shoulder fellowship page explains the programme.
- The research page describes the unit's current work.
- The shoulder surgery page.