A full pass rate
Congratulations to the orthopaedic trainees on passing their final orthopaedic fellowship examination. Queensland trainees achieved a 100% pass rate this year.
As Scientific Secretary of the Queensland Branch of the Australian Orthopaedic Association, Dr Cutbush is responsible for the trainees' educational curriculum, so a result like this is a pleasing one.
What the final fellowship examination is
Becoming an orthopaedic surgeon in Australia takes a long time. After a medical degree and several years of general hospital work, a doctor applies for a place on the orthopaedic training programme, which runs for a number of years and rotates them through the subspecialties and through city and regional hospitals. The final fellowship examination sits at the end of that programme, and passing it is what allows a trainee to be admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and to practise as a specialist.
The examination is not a paper test of memory. It assesses written knowledge, but also clinical examination of real patients and oral questioning by pairs of examiners on management decisions, including the uncomfortable ones where there is no clean answer. Candidates prepare for it for a year or more alongside a full clinical workload, which is why the result matters to the people in the photograph as much as it does.
How a branch supports its trainees
The Australian Orthopaedic Association is the professional body for orthopaedic surgeons in Australia, and it administers orthopaedic training in partnership with the College of Surgeons. Each state branch runs the local part of that: the teaching programme, the practice examinations, the rotations between hospitals and the supervision of trainees in them.
In practice that means a year-round programme of tutorials, trial examinations and case discussions, taught largely by practising surgeons who volunteer the time. The point of structuring it formally, rather than leaving teaching to whichever consultant a trainee happens to be rostered with, is that it gives every trainee in the state the same curriculum regardless of which hospital they are working in that term. Individual results vary.
Related information
- Our post on the national trial exams.
- Our post on the AORA shoulder session.
- The shoulder fellowship page covers the subspecialty training that follows.
- The shoulder surgery page.