Surprise: Experience Matters
If a patient’s ACL repair surgery was among the first 10 such cases of a surgeon’s career, the patient had about five times the risk of having another ACL repair within a year as a patient whose surgeon had performed more than 150 of the operations.
Full article on surgeons’ learning curve in The Wall Street Journal.
It’s not just experience that matters, but also how often a surgeon performs a given procedure. Research has found that the frequency of a procedures performed are high correlated with quality outcomes.
From what I have heard, military doctors are some of the freshest. Soldiers who were deployed and not deployed have told me that when you get hurt in the service and have to get surgery, that surgery may be performed by someone who is just cutting his teeth at the trade.
Do patients have the right to request background information on their surgeon before the operation? If so, how do green physicians ever get a shot to gain experience? I would have thought they would consistently be passed over.