Dr Anthony Tang
Division of General Surgery(Breast Services), NUHS
Associate Consultant
My NUH Experience- A tribute to the great mentors and teachers
 |
| "From the right: Shaik, Phil, Ching Wan, Mikhael and Me" |
After having spent four years as an Advanced Surgical Trainee, there are certainly quite a few things I am truly proud about over in NUH. Where do I start?
My Singapore experience started after I had completed my basic surgical training over in Australia, and so yes, I am a foreign graduate. The initial experience in Singapore was not too memorable, perhaps due to my strange accent, perhaps due to a different way of thought, expression and approach. Some of my colleagues now say I always seem as if I have never experienced stress or any difficulties, somewhat on a perpetual cruise mode, but in reality, I did struggle as I tried to find my footing in a land I knew little of. Well, at least a bit. By stroke of good fortune, I moved over to NUH after a year or so, and almost immediately started my Advanced Specialist Training, and truly started maturing as a surgeon.
How does a trainee mature? Simple, by having great mentors and teachers, and of course a fantastic stimulating environment to grow in. Surgery is after all an apprenticeship, and a sign of a true master is one who wishes his apprentice to excel beyond what he himself, or his generation had previously achieved. A teacher is one who naturally encourages his student to aspire greatness. It is uncommon to find even one single great master/mentor/teacher, but believe it or not, in NUH, I have found a few.
It is impossible to write an article like this and not start by mentioning Abu Rauff. Without any doubt, he is the surgeon’s surgeon. Watching him in the operating room is akin to watching a great maestro conducting a symphony. The skills and knowledge he possesses has certainly been elevated to an art. What is then even more amazing is my Professor’s honest keen desire to pass all these skills, experience, wisdom of so many years to one such as myself!, and I’m sure his other trainees feel the same. And by trainees, I include the many senior consultants in the department.
Cheong Wai Kit is in my mind the most generous surgeon I have ever come across. Most surgeons are always in a rush, time for only oneself, and trainees and junior staff are almost seen as bothersome and must be constrained to the periphery. To this grain, Wai Kit neatly goes against. He is always willing to teach and impart, even at the expense of his own important deadlines. I will always remember the many one to one tutorial sessions he gave me on Wednesday afternoons, his only free time in the week, to prepare me for my exams. It is indeed rare to find such a gem of a gentleman.
Perhaps the observation of my colleagues of me having no stress and almost always on the cheerful side of things is not so much due to natural state of my mind, but more to the reciprocation I have to the environment in which I work. Take my unit, the Breast Surgical Services, for example. The picture above exemplifies what the NUH working experience is like, with colleagues of different backgrounds coming together to think, observe, share, express, laugh. There is no other place where everyone’s thoughts and opinions really matter, especially when one is so junior.
Philip Iau is, without bias, the best leader of the team. It is humbling when the man who has first described specific breast cancer genes in Malays, or has written the breast cancer guidelines for the whole of Singapore, and in his spare time started the breast AND trauma services in NUH, assures you, ”Take as much leave as you need. Don’t worry, if need be, I will cover your clinics”. How many senior consultants do you know who have uttered such words? Shaik Ahmad is the man who provides balance to the team, with his jovial character and easy going nature. Mikhael Hartman is the prototypical cool Swede, our Karolinska connection, and epidemiology expert. Chan Ching Wan is the lady who has brought skills such as therapeutic mammoplasty to our team, and at the same time exhibited the kind of human kindness that touches even one such as I. It is often the small things that I remember, such as the time when I was sniffling away, and Ching promptly brought a tube of echinaceae the next day which she personally guranteed would work wonders. It may seem trivial, but it is these very simple, unexpected, undeserved surprises that really makes my day.
In case the impression given is one of all play and no work, did I mention that the entire team has Phd’s? Not to be left out, it is one of the reasons I decided to do some post-grad work myself, completing my Masters in Clinical Epidemiology earlier this year.
It is no surprise then that within the international milleu of the team (we have 2 UK grads, 1 local grad, 1 Swedish grad and 1 Aussie grad), research and surgical excellence is the expected norm. With the exchange of such ideas and collaboration with other research facilities such as Karolinska, we then strive to be at the forefront, the cutting edge of surgery and frontline of new discoveries.
Our unit’s culture is obviously a natural extension of the one in the Department of Surgery, spearheaded by our chief, Prof CN Lee, constantly reminding us that only the best get to be here and remain here, and to continue in our research endeavors. But these are not empty words, leaving one to blindly find your own way. Prof Lee leads by example, findings the avenues for grants and donations, searching and always filtering out potential collaboration with scientists, engineers and biotechs. It is in this culture that NUH became the first hospital to be JCI accredited, and is now accorded by the government as only one of two tertiary hospitals in Singapore, to concentrate on the latest in surgery and research. It is in this culture of teaching excellence that NUS has decided to join with NUH to form NUHS. It is in this culture that the Advanced Surgical Training Centre, with the latest training equipment and simulators for laparoscopic and robotic work, and research into NOTES, was set up. It is in this culture that the first single port surgery was done in Singapore.
It is in this culture that I matured as a surgeon
Anthony Tang
