Men lack surgeons worry about offspring

Surgeon president complains of missing male offspring

06/04/2014

The President of the German Society of General and Visceral Surgery, Matthias Anthuber, is worried about the lack of young surgeons in this country. Especially male applicants would become less and less.

There are 20 women on a male candidate
Concern about missing offspring, especially the male, is growing among German surgeons. In the past, women would have opted for surgery much less often than their male counterparts. Meanwhile, the president of the German Society for General and Visceral Surgery, Matthias Anthuber, is also worried about the male offspring. Especially men would be missing, „who, in their youth, let their craftsmanship run wild and had little interest in outstanding grades“, he said opposite „Focus“. He also reported that at his clinic, 20 women were now coming to a male surgeon.

Number clausus is too high
Anthuber, who heads the Department of General, Visceral and Transplantation Surgery at the Augsburg Hospital, said: „In the foreseeable future, we will have significantly more surgeons than surgeons.“ In his opinion, however, surgical teams should have a balanced gender relationship. „Only five percent of medical students want to become a surgical subject after the Practical Year, with a tendency to fall“, so the surgeon president. Currently, the numerus clausus with a grade of between 1.0 and 1.2 is so high that he excludes many talents.

Surgery not popular with students
The surgeons have been dealing with the lack of young talent in Germany for years. According to information from the Federal Association of German Surgeons, around 11,000 surgeons from clinics and practices will retire by the year 2020. That's about half of those in private practice and more than a third of hospital surgeons. At the same time, the subject seems to become increasingly unattractive in the course of study. At the beginning, still one third of the students who want to get into the subject, it is at the end of the study, only five percent. Reasons for the unpopularity include "the strict hierarchies, the great responsibility, the comparatively low salary at the beginning of working life, the poorly scheduled working hours and the bad reputation of education".

64 percent of medical students are women
Not only in the field of surgery, but generally in medical studies, women at German universities have access advantages thanks to the better grade point average and the numerus clausus system. Thus, meanwhile, 64 percent of medical students are women. In addition, medicine studies for young women are now apparently much more attractive than many other study programs. At the 6th International Symposium of the Austrian Medical Association a month ago in Vienna, the Chairman of the Board of the Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Thüringen (KVT), Dr. med. Annette Rommel opposite „medOnline.at“: „ For men, working as a doctor is no longer attractive because we have said for years that you do not deserve well.“ On the other hand, women still have a certain amount „clichéd idea of ​​the medical profession“, said the general practitioner. (Ad)