Chief Surgeon Job Description, Skills, and Salary
Get to know about the duties, responsibilities, qualifications, and skills requirements of a chief surgeon. Feel free to use our chief surgeon job description template to produce your own. We also provide you with information about the salary you can earn as a chief surgeon.
Who is a Chief Surgeon?
A chief surgeon (also known as a head surgeon or chief of surgery) is a senior management post held by an attending surgeon at a hospital or other medical facility. It is the title of the most senior surgeon in many institutions, but it can also refer to the most senior surgeon of a specific department within a bigger institution. A chief surgeon oversees surgical affairs and is frequently superior to other surgeons (such as consultants or attending surgeons), but he or she may also oversee other professional groups and areas of duty.
The Chief surgeon is a board-certified, experienced physician who reports to the hospital’s top management, He or she supervises hospital employees, department heads, and physicians to ensure that the highest quality and service standards are fulfilled in each surgical department throughout the facility. The institution’s policies and goals are developed in large part by the Chief Surgeon. For this difficult position, previous management experience is required. More than half of the Chief surgeons now on the job have more than fifteen years of experience.
When more than one physician is needed for a procedure, the Chief Surgeon leads a surgical team.
Chief Surgeon Job Description
Below are the chief surgeon job description examples you can use to develop your resume or write a chief surgeon job description for your employee. Employers can also use it to sieve out job seekers when choosing candidates for interviews.
The duties and responsibilities of a chief surgeon include the following:
- Create policies, quality standards, and regulations, and make sure that everyone follows them.
- Oversee several surgical departments and teams.
- Conduct surgeries and provide medical advice as needed.
- Supervise continuing education programs and tell colleagues about conferences and other educational opportunities.
- Set goals and assist others in achieving them.
- Allocate resources and assist with budget preparation.
- Interview, screen and recruit new doctors.
- Respond to all surgical and departmental complaints and difficulties.
- Maintain up-to-date knowledge about medical breakthroughs and enhance your professional network.
- Create policies, quality standards, and regulations, and make sure everyone follows them.
- Oversee many surgical departments and teams.
- Allocate resources and assist with budget preparation.
- Conduct surgeries and provide medical advice as needed.
- Supervise continuing education programs and tell colleagues about conferences and other educational opportunities.
- Set objectives and assist colleagues in achieving them.
- Keep up with medical breakthroughs and continue to improve your professional network.
Qualifications
The qualifications required for the role of a chief surgeon includes all of the following:
- A surgical doctorate or a surgical discipline.
- A residency and several years of practical experience are required.
- Excellent interpersonal and communication abilities.
- Positive attitude and resilience
- Possession of the capacity to work long hours and make choices in a fast-paced environment.
- Prior managerial or administrative experience.
- Strong analytical abilities and a high sense of detail are required for the role.
- Excellent surgical and diagnostic abilities.
- Expert knowledge is required for a correct diagnosis of a patient’s condition.
- Good communication abilities: Speaking with your medical team, patients, and their families requires communication skills. As such listening to and understanding the concerns of a diverse group of people and earning their trust requires that a chief surgeon should possess the following:
A bright, eager intellect, manual dexterity, physical ability, and Intensive preoperative and postoperative care experience.
- Ability to adapt to a changing environment: You will need to be committed and enthusiastic about acquiring new skills and practices as healthcare evolves and medical advances.
- Leadership abilities to lead your team and assist in the training of future surgeons.
- The ability to make others feel secure.
- Emotional resilience, as well as the ability to support your team in challenging situations.
Essential Skills
Below is a list of the essential skills required to become a certified chief surgeon
- Effective Communication abilities: Every profession requires communication, but none more so than medicine. Interacting with patients and coworkers will be a big part of your day, and if you don’t have good communication skills, it will not only make your job tougher, but it might also put people’s lives in danger. Communication, for example, is an important aspect of the initial diagnostic. Tests and scans can confirm or disprove certain notions, but to comprehend what is going on with a patient, you must be able to ask the correct questions, read between the lines with their responses, and communicate your opinions to them in simple terms. You must also be able to comprehend what other experts (such as nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists) are giving you and provide them with precise instructions in return.
Remember: you can be the smartest academic or the most skillful physician in the world, but if you can’t communicate and listen properly, you – and your patients – will struggle.
- Emotional intelligence: Another important quality is the capacity to show tact and empathy, especially when dealing with patients. Unfortunately, it is an unfortunate fact of the work that you will have to deliver terrible news to patients or close family on occasion. It will often be news that the recipient does not want to hear, and you must have the emotional maturity to stay professional and level-headed while explaining the appropriate course of action.
You could be telling a stranger that their wife or spouse has been in a life-changing accident, or you could be telling a patient that they have a fatal illness. These are challenging discussions that necessitate sensitivity, professionalism, and comprehension.
- Problem-solving abilities: It’s been claimed that much of medical diagnosis is detective work, involving gathering clues and data and then working toward a cause and solution; hence, being a natural problem solver can help. Of course, your training will equip you with the technical information required to comprehend such situations, but the ability to break down problems and build an internal algorithm to implement that knowledge is a skill that must be fostered and developed. You’ll also need to be able to think creatively. Not every patient presentation is straightforward, and test results may contradict your preconceptions; in these cases, channel your inner Gregory House and tackle the situation from a fresh angle.
- Attention to detail: It’s natural to overlook the small details when dealing with drug doses, patient histories, allergies, physiological variations, cultural conventions, and every other component of a busy hospital ward. In other words, any medical expert must be able to pay attention to detail.
It’s not just about getting the dosages right or being mindful of drug contraindications; it’s also about recognizing red flags and leaving no stone unturned during your first patient contact. For example, if a patient keeps appearing with new injuries every few months, it could be clumsiness – or something more serious. The point is that good doctors notice everything, even after a long and stressful day, and they don’t let anything go by.
- Decision-making abilities: All final clinical choices in inpatient care must be made by doctors, therefore you’ll need to be comfortable taking responsibility and making difficult judgments. This entails overseeing and implementing patient treatment plans, as well as explaining and justifying them to families – which can be challenging if they oppose your ideas.
It also entails the ability to make quick decisions. If you work in an emergency room, for example, you can have a patient who is well one minute and then collapses the next. The ability to stay cool, calm, and professional under pressure – as well as make sound clinical decisions – is the mark of a successful doctor or surgeon.
- Professionalism: Dealing with the public is difficult at best, but when they are stressed, unwell, emotional, or all three, things can quickly become chaotic. It’s critical that you maintain a professional demeanour at all times and do not put yourself in a position where your ability to serve patients is jeopardized.
Of course, there are various types of professionalism; daily, these may include:
Displaying good conflict resolution skills and not succumbing to verbal or even physical abuse, Treating all patients with courtesy and respect regardless of their background, making individuals who have potentially humiliating symptoms feel at ease, and ensuring that high standards of care and proper clinical procedures are maintained and followed at all times by yourself and others; and demonstrating tact and emotional maturity in dealings with patients.
- Teamwork abilities: The capacity to communicate and work as part of a larger team is one of the most important skills for any chief surgeon. This could be in an acute context, such as a trauma team or an outpatient setting, or it could be part of a larger treatment system where you are collaborating with other experts like psychiatrists or oncologists.
In any case, the capacity to connect and form relationships with peers and colleagues is critical, not only for patient care but also for maintaining a peaceful working atmosphere daily. True, no doctor can succeed without good nurses, and vice versa, thus being a team player is essential at all times.
- Leadership competencies: As previously stated, you will eventually become the go-to person when it comes to clinical calls. This could be in the midst of a highly charged and volatile acute emergency, or it could be concerning a particularly complicated ongoing case. People will look to you for advice and answers, in either case, so you must stand up to the plate.
Your leadership abilities will be tested later in your career when you are responsible for training and mentoring junior doctors and medical students. This isn’t only about giving pearls of wisdom to young minds; it’s also about leading by example and being there for others when things go wrong.
- Resilience: Although resilience is more of a ‘quality’ than a skill,’ you can still train yourself to be more resilient; in fact, you will need to, because becoming a doctor will undoubtedly expose you to things that will have an impact on your worldview and sensitivities.
You will see things that will disturb and change you from the beginning of your career, and while you will be given all the help you need to absorb and deal with this, it is a fact that some individuals react better than others. If you’re easily disturbed or shaken by things, it’s not necessarily a bad feature – after all, it shows that you’re sympathetic – but you’ll need to learn to manage it so that it doesn’t interfere with your professionalism, judgment, or ability to treat.
- learning capacity: Human bodies are so complicated that it’s nearly impossible for one individual to know everything about them; doctors, on the other hand, must come quite close.
Of course, you don’t have to be a walking encyclopedia; you can always seek advice from specialists and, well, medical encyclopedias. However, you will be taking in and absorbing vast volumes of technical material throughout medical school and the remainder of your career. If you aren’t extremely ‘book smart,’ there’s a good possibility it will catch up with you and you will fall behind.
You, too, will never completely leave the classroom. Medical discoveries and technology advance swiftly, so even if you’re a highly skilled professional, you’ll need to keep up with the latest treatment advances and trends.
How to Become a Chief Surgeon
Below is a list of the steps to take to become a certified chief surgeon
1) Get Your Medical Degree: Medical school is the first step toward a career as a surgeon. A degree in medicine that is recognized by the General Medical Council is required. These normally take five years to finish; however, candidates with a BSc in a comparable discipline can enroll in four-year graduate entrance programs. You will be referred to as a junior doctor once you have completed your degree.
2) Complete Foundation Training: Following the completion of medical school, you must complete a two-year general training foundation program. During this time, you will spend a few months in a safe, well-supervised environment trying out several specialties such as general medicine, general surgery, and psychiatry.
3) Complete Core Surgical Training: Core Surgical Training, or CST, is designed to help trainee surgeons gain proficiency in a variety of surgical knowledge and abilities. Trainees receive inpatient training in a variety of surgical specialties during this time. Regardless of their future specialization goals, all trainee surgeons must complete CST. Trainees must take The Membership Examination of the Surgical Royal Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland after CST (the MRCS).
4) Undertake Specialty Training: After you’ve finished CST, you’ll need to apply for a specialty training program. In the United Kingdom, there are 10 recognized surgical specialties, with training lasting between five and six years. After completing the program, you must sit for exams to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS).
5) Continuous Professional Development: You will never stop learning as a medical professional. Even after you’ve earned your credentials, you’ll need to keep learning through Continuing Professional Development (CPD). This could entail going to conferences and taking classes.
Where to work as a Chief Surgeon
Chief surgeons work in hospitals, medical centres, and outpatient surgical centres.
Chief Surgeon Salary Scale
As of April 26, 2022, the average Chief surgeon pay in the United States is $481,885, with a salary range of $312,638 to $619,546. Salary ranges rely on a variety of things, including schooling, certifications, supplementary talents, and the number of years you’ve worked in your field. However, a chief surgeon in the United Kingdom, on the other hand, normally takes roughly 319,000 GBP (GBP is the abbreviation for the British pound sterling, the official currency of the United Kingdom) per year. Salaries range from 166,000 GBP to 489,000 GBP (lowest to highest) (highest).