What is General Surgery?
The Department of General Surgery at North Shore Hospital deals with a wide range of conditions within the abdomen, breast, neck, and skin, including trauma. There is no vascular surgery service, and patients from the Waitemata District Health Board (WDHB) area are sent to the vascular service at Auckland City Hospital.
While the name would suggest that the focus of general surgery is to perform operations, often this is not the case. Many patients are referred to surgeons with conditions that do not need surgical procedures, but merely require counselling or medical treatment.
The Team
The leader of the general surgical team is a consultant (specialist) general surgeon. When you are referred to a clinic or admitted to hospital you will be assigned to one specific consultant. However, consultants often work in teams of two or three, and to some extent your care may be shared between these consultants.
Other medical members of the team include the registrar(s). These are fully qualified doctors who are now training to become specialists. The house surgeons are more junior doctors who have usually only qualified recently. Often there will also be trainee interns attached to the team. These are final year medical students who have completed all of their examinations and are now spending a year working on the wards prior to becoming registered as doctors. Finally, there may also be fourth and fifth year medical students attached to the team.
The medical team is complemented by the nursing staff, and a number of other staff including dietitians, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists, speech language therapists, social workers and clerical staff. On the ward there will be a charge nurse responsible for coordinating the care given by the various nursing staff. Many wards run a system where one particular staff nurse is designated as the primary caregiver for a specific patient, but this is not always the case and it is likely that you will come into contact with a number of nurses during your stay. As with the medical staff, there are often nursing students attached to the ward whose work is being supervised by their tutors and the regular nursing staff.