Balancing academia and private practice: Can it be done?
Balancing the roles of academic editor and practicing surgeon, Professor Benedict Rogers stays updated on evidence-based practices while critically evaluating new techniques. He dedicates weekends and unpaid time to academic work, carefully selecting relevant and high-quality publications. Learn how he integrates academic and clinical insights to advance surgical practices.
How does your work as an academic editor improve your role as a surgeon?
Editorial work keeps you up to date in an evidence-based way. This is where new ideas and techniques are evaluated and published. It also keeps you critiquing things and reading things critically, which is important. Not everything new, is good. How we evolve as surgeons and care for patients has changed and become more evidence-based than it used to be, thanks to academic studies. I’ve got my finger on pulse when it comes to that, thanks to the papers coming across my desk all the time.
Overseeing and writing editorial forces me to read widely and think more holistically. For example reading through the civil aviation handbook, you could replace planes with surgery and learn from the concepts to improve your approach. It’s valuable to remember how easy it is to work in a silo. Academic research in the ENT faculty or how they organise their practice, could be related to orthopaedics.
How do you decide what academic work gets published?
As an editor you really have to triage this work as being interesting or not. You look at it both as an editor and a surgeon and ask whether it stacks up on both counts. You also have to consider the reader and whether this is going to be relevant or interesting to them. You can’t only reject things because it’s bad science, but also whether it’s of interest to society. I like the blend of interest, standard-setting and science.
What does your work with Annals involve? How much time is required?
I probably spend around 3-4 hours a week on them. I’m involved in academic publishing as both author and editor and that takes a fair bit of time.
Being in the editor role gives you a more dispassionate, scientific and analytical tilt. However when writing editorials, you’ve got to think about making the content interesting and relevant, making sure to highlight the most important aspects. For example, I’ve written about the human factors in surgery - the majority of the time when there’s a mistake it’s not because of a lack of technical skill of a surgeon, it’s normally other factors. Like when a pilot crashes a plane, it’s not because they can’t fly the plane, but more likely due to a distraction.
Any interesting articles to share? How often do you write articles?
I’m the author of around 6-10 articles each year. You can find my articles on pubmed and RCS Annals.
Topics such as patient satisfaction after knee replacement is likely to be of wider interest. The Oxford Knee Score doesn’t align with patient satisfaction, so what’s the best measure?
I’m also working on content around the learning curves surrounding robotic surgery and its perceived benefits and downsides.
There’s also lots of work on sustainable surgery and the carbon cost of having an operation. Plenty of the emissions aren’t even related to the operation itself - a patient comes to the hospital maybe twice for consultation and petrol is a large part of the overall carbon footprint, more so than the carbon cost of wrappings. We offer video consultations but people want to see you face-to-face, even just to discuss results, which is understandable.
Meet Professor Benedict Rogers
Professor Benedict Rogers is an experienced consultant orthopaedic surgeon specialising in hip and knee procedures. Alongside his NHS roles and private practice, he is a reviewer for the following journals: Bone & Joint Journal (formerly JBJS Br), JBJS Am, Journal of Arthroplasty & Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research (CORR).
