In South Africa
One of the most common questions we get asked both by junior doctors as well as by patients is how long does it take to become an orthopaedic surgeon?
1. Medical School
Once you’re done with metric, the first thing you’re going to do is get into medical school. There about about seven to eight medical schools within South Africa and it takes you six years to get medical degree
2. Internship
Once you have a medical degree you have to do what’s called an internship where you work for the state under supervision for about two years in a public hospital. During these two years, you start off learning how the hospital works and also rotate to various different specialties. It’s a good opportunity to kind of see what you enjoy and what you want to do for the rest of your life.
3. Community Service
Now that you have done your internship, you technically are an independent practitioner, but you cannot work in private until you’ve done a community service here. For the hospital, and usually this is done a bit more in either in a district or a rural hospital in the state sector in South Africa.
Once you’re done with that, you have the decision either going to private practice as a general practitioner or you can choose to specialize generally with the surgical disciplines, most people don’t jump into the specialty immediately or a training program.
4. Medical Officer
They do what’s called medical office at time, so. As a medical officer, you get to work in the orthopaedic department, you get to operate and see patients, and learn about the discipline without being able to further your training.
5. Registrar
Once you’ve got enough medical officer time, and for most people that involves also getting part one or part three of your surgical exams, you get to apply for what’s called a registrar or resident position.
A registrar or resident position is about four to five years of a structured program. within an academic orthopedic department that guides you towards becoming an orthopaedic surgeon. So there’s three Components you need to complete before being able to register As an orthopaedic surgeon. So one is to complete your registrar time.
6. Registrar 2
Two is to complete three qualifying exams.
7. Registrar
And the third thing is to complete what’s called an M. Med or a Masters of Medicine degree and usually involves doing a dissertation or publishing an article in a peer reviewed journal. it doesn’t just end there. When you become an orthopaedic surgeon, a lot of people during their training, they tend to find a niche or an interest, which sort of makes them want to subspecialize.
8. Sub specialty Fellowship Arthroplasty
The journey towards becoming an orthopaedic surgeon, which takes roughly give or take about 15 years.
And for most of us, the journey doesn’t end there. Since the field of orthopaedics is such a rapidly evolving and growing exciting field, many orthopaedic surgeons, such as myself, choose to focus on certain areas of the body or certain procedures within orthopaedics.
The discipline which I chose to focus on is called arthroplasty or joint replacements of the hip and knee.
To do this, I first went to Tygerberg Hospital where I completed the Tygerberg Hospital Arthroplasty Fellowship.
After that, I went to Toronto and Canada and did a one year fellowship, the University of Toronto at a hospital called the Sunnybrook Holland Orthopaedic and Arthritic Center, which is an extremely high volume orthopaedic center, probably one of the largest in North America where we used to do about two and a half thousand joint replacements a year