UK Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery trainees join the specialist list at a similar age to other surgical specialists.

Abstract

It is 11 years since Cameron and Westcott published 'Maxillofacial training is no longer than other surgical specialties'1. This showed that OMFS trainees completed training at ages comparable to their surgical peers. Much has changed in surgical training since then so an updated review was undertaken. Based on published training pathways specialty training in most surgical specialties should be ten years (two years foundation, two years core and six years specialty training). For OMFS specialty training in the UK from either medicine first or dentistry first is 18-21 years depending on the length of second degrees and participation in pre-Certificate of Competition of Training (CCT) fellowships. Information on the age of entry onto the surgical specialist lists between 1997 and 2018 was obtained from the General Medical Council (GMC). The 'age on entry' included the ages of specialists from other nations joining the list for the first time and doctors re-joining the lists after a break. The age on joining surgical specialist lists ranged from 27-83 years, with the median of 39 and mean of 41.4 years. In Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMFS), age ranged from 32-67 years, with the median and mean of 41 and 42.7 years respectively. Looking in more detail at the small differences in median and mean, the surgical specialties of vascular and cardiothoracic had age distributions which were statistically similar to OMFS. For other surgical specialties the distribution was wider. The small number of OMFS specialists whose age at joining the OMFS specialist list in their early 30s had all trained overseas in nations where the second degree was incorporated into specialty training. These data show that there is a small difference between age on entry to the OMFS specialist list and those joining other surgical specialties. Combining integration of second-degree studies into UK specialty training as recommended by the 2008 PMETB Review of OMFS Training with the new competency based OMFS curriculum could reverse this age difference.