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hospital where we would go when we had finished working. If there was a lot of work to do, everybody would help out everybody else. So, the fundamental character traits in those days were that you were a sociable person, who would get on well with colleagues and help your colleagues, without having to be asked to do so. Nowadays, of course, things are entirely different. So, the character traits are really driven by the working and the social circumstances of the time period you are talking about.
T.S.: Why should a resident choose Reconstructive Urology today? How many reconstructive urologists can a city or a country actually have?
Prof. Anthony Mundy: I think you don't really choose very much throughout your career on what you want to do. It is a question of what is available and what is available changes from time to time and from region to region within a country. Within a big city, like London, for example, you have North London, which is different from South London. So, what is an available job is, to a certain extent, a matter of sheer chance. But equally, things these days are far more driven by what you have to do to satisfy the national training programme. So, if you want to be a surgeon, you have to go through a certain process of training in various different areas. Typically, everybody has to do some general surgery,
everybody has to do some orthopaedics, but not everybody has to do some of the other specialties. So in the end what you choose to do will depend on your personal experience of the specialty you work in and how you get on with the people you work with - whether you work for somebody who is a really nice guy, friendly and helpful, and helps you along the way or for somebody who is arrogant, ignores you, and couldn't care less whether you are there with him or not. I'm exaggerating a bit to make a point.
As to how many reconstructive urologists you need, it depends on what you mean by reconstructive urologists. There are some people who call themselves reconstructive urologists because they deal with urethral stricture disease. That is the defining feature. Well, it is certainly true that it is the largest part of the workload. But equally in some respects, it's the easiest part of the workload. It is like calling yourself a general physician, when 90% of your patients have a runny nose and a cough, particularly in the winter, and every now and then you see somebody with some really weird medical condition you may never have seen before. All of these sorts of patterns change what people do. I suppose next most common, after a urethral stricture, the reconstructive urologists, in a more general sense, will do things like artificial sphincter implants in patients with post-radical prostatectomy incontinence and then you could go on to the occasional things, which a reconstructive urologist may see once
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