Hi, I'm doing a school project on doctors and I have a question. If a doctor wants to change their specialty, what kind of channels do they have to go through and how long does it take? Do they have to redo their entire 2 year residency....or do they get to take a shorter path because they are already doctors? What if they are scaling down to a speciality that requires less training...like if a hand surgeon wanted to be an OB/GYN instead?
Thanks!
Dakota %26lt;3
How does a doctor change specialities?
The doctor will need to %26quot;redo%26quot; a majority of the residency. The shortest residency is internal medicine, which is 3 years. If a physician wants to specialize after the 3 year internal medicine residency, he/she can apply for a fellowship which is an additional 3 years (for cardiology, pulmonology, GI). Now, there are many specialties which require the resident to complete the first year of internal medicine residency (called an internship) before moving into their major residency (like dermatology, radiology, anesthesiology). After the 1 year of internship, they will then finish 3 years of their specialty residency. So if a radiologist decided to be a dermatologist, he/she would only need to %26quot;redo%26quot; the final 3 years of residency, because he/she had already done the internship.
Surgery is a different internship, though, and is 5 years for general surgery. OB/Gyn, urology, ENT, orthopedics, plastics, those are all surgery subspecialties, so they will all do the first year of surgery internship and then finish the 4 years of specialty surgery.
The most difficult switch would be from a medicine specialty to a surgery specialty, because then the doctor would also be required to go through the internship year before starting the specialty residency. Hope this helps, I know it can get complicated!
How does a doctor change specialities?
To my knwoledge they would have to complete another residency,
