Surgery

[Dr Noodle]

Ha ye i get your point. I'll put it a different way, is there such thing as emergency surgery?

[heed]

well yes there is surgery in emergency medicine - but not performed by the emergency medics (the A+E guys). A+E docs will put in chest drains, maybe even emergency surgical airways but wont be doing all the ER-esque thoracotomy rib-smashing fandango u see on the television. Surgery is done in A+E quite frequently - seen two chests and an abdomen opened up in resus in the last fortnight, but again its done by the appropriate surgical team who just need to leg it to A+E when the patient is too unstable to move to theatres.

"Emergency Surgery" also includes non-elective non-planned things like appendicectomies at 4am etc.

If you want to do true "emergency surgery" then may i suggest going to south africa for a bit at some point during your training. A+E in JoBurg is like a war zone, and you will see some pretty amazing surgery done in pretty awful circumstances.

[Dr Noodle]

I might at some stage i want to do some voluntary work with medicins sans frontiers after i'm qualified. So could any surgical speciality do that depending on the injury or is there a 'trauma surgery' speciality?

[heed]

there is a trauma surgery specialty - the character Alex Kingston plays on ER..... generaly Trauma is part of ortho and deals with the bony stuff. if someone needed a thoracotomy you would need a cardiothoracic surgeon, a laparotomy would be a general/GI kinda thing, neuro would do the neuro stuff etc etc

like i said if you want true Trauma surgery then south africa is the best place.

[Dr Noodle]

Well I'm not even in med school yet so I'm not naive enough to assume I know what I want to do I was just enquiring for curiosity sake. Did you work there?

[heed]

i am hopefully going next year - one of my paediatrician mates went a few years back and people in years above me have gone and have had a blast. you never know tho - the way surgical specialties are going with MMC, there may be "A+E surgeons" when you are qualified or maybe we will all be obsolete and nurse practitioners will have taken over the world in some sort of planet of the apes style coup lol

[Dr Noodle]

Super nurse do do do dooo!