INSIDE INFORMATION

 

"Vascular surgery is a truly exciting and challenging specialty. It involves interacting with a wide range of specialists, exercising sound judgment in many complex clinical situations and utilizing a wide range of technical skills to treat a number of different pathologies in every part of the human body."

Dr Carl Muthu, Vascular Surgeon, Auckland District Health Board

Click on the questions below to view comments from more clinicians.

Why did you choose this specialty, and what do you most like about it?

 

	The specialty affords relative autonomy in diagnosis, multimodality treatment and follow up, allowing for the overall management of each case. The work is reconstructive and offers technical challenges. There are many appealing new technology opportunities.

 

	It is essential that you should possess technical skill and aptitude for learning new procedures.  Good judgement and the ability to cope under stress is important.

 

	Increasingly there is a trend towards integration of some areas more traditionally in the domain of interventional radiology (endovascular surgery). It remains unclear as to how this will be integrated into mainstream Vascular Surgery with the possibility that this could be a major part of practice.

 

	If you are interested in pursuing this field of work you should discuss the specialty with a local vascular surgeon.

 

	Opportunities are significant: New Zealand is undersupplied, especially now that there are fewer surgeons undertaking combined training in general and vascular surgery.

 

	One contributor commented that it is difficult to take time out since the training programme takes five years to complete and hours of work in the specialty are long.

 

	Vascular surgery entails significant time commitments. An average working week would usually involve a minimum of 60 hours, so the impact on family life can be considerable.