This is going to be a very traditional General Surgery position with the main components being elective Acute Care, Endoscopies, Robotic minimally invasive surgery plus a huge need for anyone interested in wound care, bariatrics, developing a trauma service and the ability to do anterior access. The hospital has a Da Vinci Xi Robot with plenty of time every week to get consistent block time and the team does a lot of abdominal wall reconstruction with the robot. There are no employed Gastroenterologists, so the General Surgeons do most of the Endoscopies. They do have a GI that comes out four days a month and they have an APP who supports the medical side of GI, so he is doing scopes when he is here. Right now, the wait time to get an office visit for new patients is almost two weeks. Once they get an office visit, they can usually get them in for surgery within a week.
When talking to Dr. Caulfield, she said “This will be ideally a general surgeon that has an area of focus or expertise, because that's kind of how they have brought Eric and myself in. We both have unique interests and have been able to a lot of outreach and marketing to capture that market. Eric's subspecialty is endoscopy, as he did an endoscopy fellowship, and focuses endoscopic intervention and ERCP. I do a lot of breast cancer specific reconstruction oncoplastic, do if someone can add a skillset that would be ideal.”
She continued, “Where we have a big need is trauma, because we eventually would like to have a trauma director to build a more mature trauma program especially with bringing in Dr. Provus, the Orthopedic Trauma Surgeon, so that we can kind of have a little bit more of a mature trauma program. Eric and I both came from big trauma programs. And so, we're kind of used to and familiar with that. Neither of us really have the bandwidth right now to manage or direct that and if we could get someone who had an interest in that, that would be great. Another bonus I would say is bariatric, as that was really handled by the provider that left, the other one is spine exposure.”
The department does not have a big need for Breast Surgery, as Dr. Caufield does a lot of it. You should be competent enough though to do basic breast surgery, mastectomy, lumpectomy, and non-recon stuff. They do see a lot of hernias and it seems like proportionally more for the population. Everybody is extremely active, and a lot of them are older, in their 70s & 80s, which probably has a lot to do with it.
In addition to that, they do see a small percentage of Pediatrics. It will be basic, mostly Urology and ENT type cases like circumcisions, tubes, that type of thing. Occasionally they do a pediatric general surgery case like an appendectomy or something and its very, very unusual for them to do anything with a patient under the age of five.