Real life cardio-thoracic surgery training in Europe: facing the facts

The Real Facts of Life

The problems in Harold Walker’s latest essay, amusingly titled “The Facts of Life”, start with his very first line: Digital Modulation is usually a form of pulse modulation, of which, there are two types-Pulse Width and Pulse position. What about pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), phase shift keying (PSK) and frequency shift keying (FSK), just to mention a few others? All pulses are analyzed by ...

The price to pay: perversions in (cardio)thoracic surgical training.

The extraordinary actuality of the article of Lim and Tsui [1] and, more importantly, the reflection of Mestres et al. [2] are my excuses for this letter. Being a general thoracic surgeon in Hungary with significant senior post experience in UK my reflection is of a mate fighting in the same trench in the next platoon. As failed professionals [3] we are getting what we deserve. Pure logic dicta...

Facing the Facts

This paper has two simple messages: 1. Remove overconfidence in order to make quality visible; 2. This requires earlier and more frequent review than is usually done. 'If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in' Anon. Initial questions (answers later) 1) Are defects good or bad? 2) If your reviewer tells that they found no defects in a ...

Facing the facts.

Thoracic training across Europe: the trainees' perspective.

Training in general thoracic surgery is facing several challenges. There are considerable variations between thoracic surgical training programmes internationally. Some are trained as cardiothoracic surgeons, some monospecialist thoracic surgeons, specialist thoracic and vascular surgeons, while others train as general surgeons with thoracic practice. Training must encompass the evolving treatm...