becoming a plastic surgeon

**mn0710** · 17-07-2007, 11:41 PM

just out of curiosity ..what training do you need to become a plastic surgeon?

**laurence83** · 18-07-2007, 12:19 AM

Check out this website
www.bapras.org.uk

This article seems to cover it...
http://www.bapras.org.uk/UploadFiles...aining-BMJ.pdf

**v1ss1** · 18-07-2007, 07:57 PM

How long would someone need to become a plastic surgeon after completing the medical school?

**dreamyrover** · 25-04-2008, 11:03 PM

it would depend on whether you want to be a general plastic surgeon or a more specialised plastic surgeon such as craniofacial plastic surgery obviously the more specialist you go the tougher and longer it'll be. But as I understand currently with the MMC thing after medical school it'll take you (roughly) 8ish years to complete your specialist training. I'm not a medical student or anything the only reason I know anything about plastic surgery is because my brother had to have tons of skin grafts to his legs and secondly I'm currently doing an MSc in tissue engineering and there's a plastic surgeon on the course who keeps telling us how he can't get a SHO job, hence why he's doing the MSc to fatten his cv up.

**rjm** · 26-04-2008, 11:09 AM

Its possibly one of the most competitive specialties to get specialist training in. Your probably looking at 10 years at least in current training plan - F1/F2 then ST1-8, assuming you can get straight from F2 into ST1 which is pretty unlikely for plastics. It might be that you cant get into it until ST3.

**Touche** · 26-04-2008, 12:09 PM

Plastics is very competitive. This should give you an idea of just what that means:

http://www.mmc.nhs.uk/Docs/st3_specialtysummary.pdf

As you can see last year at ST3 level there were 55 jobs going and 996 applications. These are all doctors who believe they have a shot at getting one of those jobs... and around 95% of those applications were unsuccessful.

Plastics has been decoupled this year. This means you will do F1+2 and then try to get a 'Surgery in General' core training rotation for 2 years. This pretty competitive in itself. If you're sure you want to do plastics and not any other type of surgery there are a few (this year six places nationally) plastics themed core training rotations going. These have more exposure to plastics than a typical 'Surgery in General' rotation so *possibly* giving you a better shot at an ST3 job. Competition for these will be immense.

After your core rotation you apply to ST3. Again, this will be very competitive. Its very possible you will not get your job right away. What do you do if you don't? A research degree might be an idea, some people might opt for some time abroad, some people might take non-training jobs trying to get more experience. Pre MMC it was not uncommon to see people stuck trying to get plastics reg jobs for 6-7 years!