in medical care you have titles such as “Resident” and “Fellow” etc, what do these titles mean and what sort of heiarchy do they possess?
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I’ll use the roadmap to becoming a trauma surgeon because it’s easier to follow in my opinion.
You start out as a **medical student** who is in medical school and is not a doctor yet.
Then after medical school you become an **intern/resident**. Interns are just people in their first year of residency (all interns are residents, not all residents are interns). Residents have officially completed their degree and are medical doctors, but do not have a specialty yet. Residency is where you would learn to become a general surgeon (your specialty in this case).
After completing your general surgery residency, you are a fully trained general surgeon. This means you can be an attending in general surgery. **Attendings** are people who can independently practice in a particular area without anyone supervising them (when you’re a resident you still have to work under an attending even though you are technically a doctor).
In order to become a trauma surgeon you have to be a general surgeon first. If you want to gain additional training in a subspecialty (like trauma) you can become a **fellow**. Your fellowship is where you would learn how to go from being just a general surgeon to being a trauma surgeon as well.
After completing your trauma surgery fellowship you could be a trauma surgery attending.
TL;DR: Attending > fellow > resident/intern > medical student
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This is the summary:
Undergraduate- usually 4 years in biology, chemistry, or other science.
Medical school- 4 years of school to complete doctorate in medicine
Residency- after you finish med school, you do what is typically 3-5 years in specialty training. These are doctors, but not board certified in anything yet. They are studying things like pediatrics, general surgery, psychiatry, etc. Once complete, they take their boards and practice independently as an attending in that specialty, or pursue even further training as a fellow.
Fellowship- this is SUBspecialty training after residency. They are specializing even further, into things like pediatric nephrology, colorectal surgery, and addiction medicine in psychiatry. This usually lasts 1-3 years. Once you finish this, you can practice independently as an attending in this SUBspecialty.
Watch scrubs. It explains it. Over the series you watch the main cast go from intern to resident to attending to fellow.
Those are terms I’ve seen on USA shows, In UK it’s slightly different:
Med Student – As it says on the tin. Usually 4-6 years of schooling
Foundation Years 1 and 2 (or FY1 and FY2) – This is after you get your medical degree and usually involves ‘rotations’ – working in different departments or spcialities. You get a temporary medical licence at the start of FY1, and a full licence at the end. People at this stage are usually known as ‘Junior Doctors’
After that, you specialise and become a ‘registrar’ of a speciality while you train for it (Min 6 years) then a ‘Consultant’ or You if are a GP speciality Registrar, after 3 years you are then a GP.
There are a few other titles knocking about depending on where someone is and what they do. for example, a Clinical fellow would be in-between Junior Doctor and Registrar – And you are half doing clinical work and half doing research and producing papers.
There can also be ‘Senior’ versions of a lot of the roles too.
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