Fellowships are one of the many ways Massachusetts General Hospital ensures its staff is the most skilled in the world. Mass General depends on philanthropic support to provide the level of advanced training modern medicine requires.
Endowed Fellowships: Providing a Bridge to Excellence
There are capable well-trained surgeons. And there are surgeons who aim to influence the field by acquiring advanced training, performing innovative research and guiding the young surgeons who will follow them. These academic surgeons are shaped by the completion of a fellowship — an intense period of training that is designed to bring a talented individual to another level of practice.
“Fellowships provide a bridge that takes surgeons from being merely good at something to being excellent,” says David Rattner, MD, chief of the Division of General and Gastrointestinal Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. “We want our surgical fellows to be able to provide the kind of care we deliver at the Mass General. Ultimately, this is the path to becoming a teacher because they receive an intense mentoring experience.”
Matthew Hutter, MD, MPH, benefited from that during the clinical fellowship he completed with Dr. Rattner. “When I finished my general surgery residency, I knew I wanted to specialize in minimally invasive techniques,” says Dr. Hutter. “The fellowship gave me the opportunity to work one-on-one with Dr. Rattner on the clinical problems of advanced laparoscopic surgery. By focusing on those problems, you can help solve them.”
Dr. Hutter, who also completed a research fellowship, is accomplishing precisely that. At age 39, he serves as medical director of the Codman Center for Clinical Effectiveness in Surgery at the MGH, performs research on surgical outcomes and quality of care and directs his own research fellows. By developing an approach to collecting nationwide data on bariatric (weight loss) surgery, he is influencing practice well beyond the MGH.
A generation ago, Medicare funded fellowships. But that is no longer the case, notes Dr. Rattner. Without philanthropic support for a surgical fellowship, Dr. Rattner may not have had a mechanism for this kind of advanced training.
Dr. Hutter couldn’t agree more. “The most valuable aspect of my fellowship was working closely with a mentor like Dr. Rattner, who is very committed to his fellows,” he says. “But you learn much more than the technical aspects of surgery. You have an opportunity to see how masters like Dr. Rattner practice the art of medicine outside of the operating room as well. The compassion and caring that he has for his patients is one of the most admirable qualities that I aspire to achieve.”
If anyone needs proof that a surgical fellowship provides a bridge to excellence, Dr. Rattner cites his young colleague, who has already accomplished much. “Dr. Hutter is a surgical fellow who made the leap,” says Dr. Rattner. “He is nationally known. In surgery circles, he’s a star.”
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