Surgical Education in Greece

Abstract

Nowadays, many important changes to residents' education are being introduced, including the regulation of working hours, the waiting time to start specialization, the training programs in new technologies, the heterogeneity of trainers and educational centers, and the existence of many different subspecializations. In Greece we have not yet established all the arrangements needed to meet the European Community's legislation concerning working hours apart from the extremely long waiting time to begin surgical training. There is an enormous heterogeneity among hospitals that provide surgical specialties, but there is no educational program that all residents have to follow to complete their training. Only in major university or general hospitals are the residents enrolled in a specific educational program and complete an adequate number of surgical procedures. With respect to training in new technologies, there is a lack of experienced surgical departments around Greece that provide this type of education to all residents. Of course, efforts have been made to meet the international educational criteria and there are many major general hospitals that can provide an adequate and up-to-date surgical education, although much still needs to be done to meet the international standards.

Medical training in Greece: A crisis in progress

“…Several of the trainees' complaints expressed in the survey such as bureaucratic tasks, little time for education and poor support from tutors have been addressed before both in Greece [12,15] and in other European countries [31][32][33]. However, the absence of a formal educational program during specialty training [12,15], which was the most commonly reported problem, separates Greece from other developed countries.…”

“…Reforming the access of graduates to specialty training programs is advised, since the current system of waiting lists has created a bottleneck [9,11,12], delaying specialty training without taking into consideration the skills and abilities of each candidate.…”

“…There is a waiting list for specialty training programs; waiting times can be long, especially for high profile specialties or hospitals [9,11,12]. There have been studies advocating the reform of postgraduate medical education in Greece in order to address issues such as the lack of a coherent, uniform educational program [12,15] or the heavy workload of specialty trainees [15].…”

“…Chronic malfunctions have been described, such as inefficient management [6], excessive spending due to mounting drug costs and wasteful use of high-end technology [6,7], emphasis on curative services rather than on prevention [6,8], neglect of primary healthcare [8] and oversupply of physicians, mainly specialists with concurrent shortage of general practitioners [3,[8][9][10][11][12].…”

“…Medical graduates are required to fulfill 1 year of compulsory rural health service and 9 months of compulsory military service (for males) before beginning their specialty training [9,11,12]. There is a waiting list for specialty training programs; waiting times can be long, especially for high profile specialties or hospitals [9,11,12].…”