To reject trainee surgeon?

You are well within your rights to ask that certain doctors may not treat you. The surgeon has told you, the resident doctor maybe the one that operates, perhaps giving you the opportunity to agree or not. It is quite normal, but l totally understand it can be extremely stressful when it's your child. Please speak up, no one will treat you any different.....you never know, this resident doctor could be months off being a qualified surgeon...who knows, but please, speak up...

You are not unreasonable, you can choose your own doctor.

However, at the hospital I work at majority of neurosurgery is performed by students cause there are so few cases and they need the training. These students are in their late 20's or early 30's with PhD and years of medical training and extensive studies in the area.

I work in this field at a pretty senior level. The way the system works is that even if they are called a trainee, they are called so because they are yet to complete all the formalities and the 7+ years of training before they can get a consultant job. If it is a child’s ophthalmology surgery the ‘trainee’ is likely to be one in their later stage of training or probably even a ‘fellow’ who has completed training to become an ophthalmologist but is doing further subspeciality training to be able to work as a Paediatric ophthalmology consultant. Any ‘trainee’ allowed to do any part of a surgery on a child is likely to have had lots of experience doing that or other surgical procedures in other patients(adults and sometimes even children) there may be a trainee doing that particular procedure the first time, but they will have had done similar before. Doing surgery under direct supervision of a senior as a training is the only way to learn surgical techniques to one day become a consultant doing these surgeries without supervision. The senior consultant you would like to have operate on your child is also there at the level because they have once had the opportunity to operate under direct supervision and get trained. Also every child who undergoes surgery is treated equally important by every medical team! Hope all goes well with the procedure.

Do you think this doctor hasn’t done any surgery before? It sounds like it. I honestly don’t think anyone on here can reassure you. Best thing would be to speak to your GP of your concerns.

To ease your mind, when my son was 6 he had a brain tumour. It was the person below the consultant who did the op under the supervision of the consultant. My son made a full recovery and is in his second year at university! I hope that gives you some comfort and I sincerely hope your child is better soon.

Of course they will tell her because they need her consent before they go ahead with her child's surgery. Imagine if something did go wrong and they didn't tell her?

Everything is explained in great detail before you sign the consent form including who is doing the surgery. Or that's been the case for my son's multiple surgeries anyway.

I would rather someone who is being watched like a hawk before every cut is doing my surgery than someone whose done it so many times they risk becoming complacent does it….

Pay for it yourself then

I think you need to ask all the relevant questions to the people involved. It’s not possible to give an appropriate answer without ALL of the relevant facts. I hope all goes well for your daughter.

Yanbu

YABU. How do you think surgeons get experienced? They work as juniors under supervision of somebody more senior.

Frankly, I’m surprised they told you and didn’t just go ahead.

OP I don’t blame you at all for having concerns. I would request a further consultation to clarify who will be doing what, and how many of these type of operations they have carried out. This can all be done politely, your concern for your child is entirely natural.
Hope it all goes well for your child.
x

This is how it works. There would be no consultants if nobody was allowed to operate until they were a consultant.

A registrar is considered 'in training' until they are a consultant. They generally do the donkey work under the supervision of the Consultant. This applies to every specialism. If they are surgeons they will be operating probably 4 days a week. The Consultant will probably also have a private practice and spend a lot of time teaching.

In this case the Consultant is going to be there right next to the Registrar.

No I was given specific names and spoke to their secretaries. I met with one and chose him. There was never any possibility of anyone else doing it.

Although it's not quite like that DH found it very easy to change consultants when he wasn't comfortable with the first one he saw. He wasn't even asked why he wanted to change.

You were given your choice of senior consultant's clinic and hospitals. Within each team there will be the senior consultant and a number of other highly qualified doctors who, depending on the details of the case, may or may not be the ones carrying out some consultations or the actual surgery.

Quite a few years ago I was given the choice of consultant and hospital for a minor procedure. I actually spoke to the consultant once for under 5 minutes and after that saw a different surgeon from the same general surgery team. Due to the nature of this minor op under local anaesthetic this other surgeon did everything on the day including teaching a more junior (but still qualified) doctor who was observing. I didn't even see the consultant after the first time, but every correspondence came from "senior consultant's name" clinic.

Even at my recent first consultation at Kings College that wasn't with the consultant on the letterhead but a different doctor from there. We're talking here about spinal surgery.

Not quite. They gave me the option between 3 health trusts that had their own surgeons working out of each and I got to choose which one and we did that based on their reviews and calendars.

Go to sleep then and stop posting unhelpfully to a parent concerned about medical care for her child.

@Sheiswaiting yes it’s ludicrous isn’t it ?like some of the replies suggesting the op has no options it’s free shut up and put up.

The NHS gave you a list of surgeons and indeed hospitals and said “take your pick”? @Willyoujustbequiet

I had rare and critical surgery on my eye 5 years ago. It was an op always under GA but as it was during Covid I was sedated not fully unconscious as they weren’t taking overnight cases. I was assigned a “student” not the consultant I had been previously seen by (without notice, but that’s typical of that eye hospital & another story!) - said student was a fully-fledged surgeon. I could hear how well he was supervised by the consultant throughout the op. Optical surgery is micro & projected onto a huge screen and everyone in theatre can see it - in that sense far easier to supervise than nirmal body surgery.

That's not our recent experience at all.

For DD surgery we were given a choice of surgeons and hospitals.

Sorry op has been given so much grief. It's a completely understandable concern.

In the OP’s shoes, given her husband doesn’t seem at all clear what the surgeons actually said, I would have probably clarified the situation first before committing my entire afternoon to debating it on mumsnet.

I don’t know if you have misunderstood, OP but the consultant surgeon and resident doctor (who will be registrar level) will both be specialists in this field. So you want be having a resident doctor who does mainly thoracic surgery, for example, doing ophthalmic surgery on your child. The resident doctor would have many many hours of ophthalmic surgical experience under their belt, they won’t straight into complex surgery having not done so. Some or all of the operation may be done by the resident doctor, depending on their level of experience, under the supervision of the consultant. Who that resident doctor is, you won’t know because no-one knows yet - it will depend on the rota, leave, staff sickness, patient sickness (called to see an emergency) etc.