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Junior neurosurgeons

• SHOs new to neurosurgery are faced with a huge swamp of knowledge to wade through, and little idea of what they actually need to know. 

• Unlike the other specialty surgeries (ENT, opthalmology, maxfax), neurosurgery has many inpatients and a heavy on-call take. 

• The teaching of this speciality is limited in medical school. 

• Neurosurgery has some of the sickest hospital inpatients, they can deteriorate quickly and often irreversibly if a problem is not recognised or the wrong diagnosis is made. 

• Patients rarely die or become disabled during an operation unless they were already in extremis. 

• Instead the situation SHOs need to prepare for is a ‘failure to rescue’, a deteriorating post-op case or emergency admission who could have been saved if things had been done differently on the ward. 

• All of this may sound scary, but neurosurgery is enormously rewarding and fun. You may not recognize it, but by doing neurosurgery as an SHO you will be leveling up relative to your peers. 

• The neurosurgery SHO’s we have trained with have developed excellent emergency assessment, procedural, and critical decision making skills. They work well with others, can lead effectively, and are decisive in a crises. 

The aim

• This site aims to provide the information an SHO new to neurosurgery needs to be safe and effective.

• This is not a high brow textbook with aspirations of getting you through the FRCS. 

• This is a high yield resource, quick to search and easy to read.