Extremely busy job when I did it - having spoken to current juniors sounds like not much has changed. Lots of patients (30+ on the list), and variable staffing rates. Locums may or may not cover when you are short-staffed (lots of people know how busy the job is and would rather do a colorectal or upper GI locum). Given how busy each day is, and how long the jobs list is (3 people can just about get through it by 5pm on a good day, but often not), there is very little opportunity for F1s or F2s to go to theatre. The F2 job is essentially no different to the F1 job on this firm. All theatre opportunities go to the SpRs and you can only go on the very rare occasion that the jobs list is slightly lighter and you are over-staffed. The consultants are very encouraging of you coming to theatre and are happy to welcome you, and you will be provided with fantastic training opportunities if you go, but I'm not sure they quite appreciate how busy and hectic the wards are. The patients tend to be long-stayers and often suffer multiple complications post-operatively. You will get to know the patients very well as they stay for weeks (or months), but this can be very depressing as the patients struggle emotionally with the horrendous recovery from PPPDs. The patients also tend to get very sick (you will find on surgical nights that if a surgical patient starts NEWsing it's HPB 50% of the time). As an F1/F2 you have very little clinical decision making capacity. HPB is extremely sub-specialised and essentially all clinical questions the nurses ask have to be directed via the SpRs (who will often ask the consultants). This means you will spend 4 months basically doing logistical and administrative work - this is often the case in any surgical FY programme, but I think especially so here. There are no formal teaching opportunities provided. No weekly HPB teaching, and not really any ad-hoc teaching either. You will learn a fair amount about HPB surgery via osmosis, but don't expect formal teaching at all. The consultants are mostly very friendly, with a couple of scary ones. Not allowed to name names here. They are all extremely skilled and dedicated surgeons. In terms of the on-calls - general surgery weekends (which you will have to do whatever gen surg rotation you do here) are notorious for being absolutely hellish. There is 1 general surgery F1 who on each weekend day has to do 4 ward rounds (which happen randomly at any time of day) - post-take, upper GI, colorectal, HPB. You are then left on the wards with an insane jobs list generated from these 4 ward rounds as the SHO is clerking and your SpR is in theatre (and wouldn't do ward jobs anyway). If you're lucky, the urology or T&O F1s will come and help you, but otherwise it is literally impossible and you will be hounded by the nurses and bed managers constantly who don't understand that you physically cannot do all of the things they want you to. They desperately need to hire an extra surgical F1 to help on the weekends (but as of 2022 this is not the case, and doesn't look likely in the future). Overall - if you're picking your jobs for the Royal Surrey and want a gen surg rotation, I would recommend colorectal as the best job (smallest list, very chill), followed by upper GI and HPB in last place.

Cut up lasted a day and a half, and you're expected to do all the smalls from that day as well, on top of reporting urgents wen you'd finished for the day. Dysfunctional consultant body who took you for granted. Unfeasible workloads for ST2/3.

Did this as an FY1, got lots of experience on medical take and some independant practice as the only junior on ward cover. Small hospital so got to know lots of the regs which made it much easier to be supported on nights when exposed to complex/sick patients. Poor quality teaching programme although I’d still choose exposure to oncalls and actual decision making over a high quality teaching programme

I’m not surgical inclined but if I was I think would’ve been a fantastic placement - lots of theatre time and management of breast abscess pathway ‘mini take’. Supportive team that cared about my training