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From Transplants to Transforming Surgical Education AS PROFESSOR OSCAR TRAYNOR RECEIVES AN HONORARY FELLOWSHIP OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, CLAIRE O’ CONNELL SPOKE TO HIM ABOUT HIS ROLE IN DRIVING CHANGES IN SURGERY IN IRELAND
For much of this period, Professor Traynor has also worked at RCSI to pioneer new approaches to surgical training, including online delivery, simulation and the all-important art of managing human factors. In recognition of his contribution to surgery and surgical education, in October 2021 Professor Traynor was made an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (ACS). He received the prestigious honour at a virtual Convocation ceremony before the opening of the virtual ACS Clinical Congress 2021, one of the largest educational meetings of surgeons in the world. Not one to rest on his laurels, Professor Traynor continues to be at the forefront of surgical training in his role as Professor of Postgraduate Surgical Education at RCSI, this year unveiling a brand new curriculum that takes a holistic approach to educating and assessing trainee surgeons.
SURGERY – THE OBVIOUS CHOICE
Professor Oscar Traynor, RCSI Fellow (1978) and Professor of Postgraduate Surgical Education at RCSI.
rofessor Oscar Traynor remembers it well. It was January 1993, and years of work were culminating in a landmark day for Ireland. He and colleague Mr Gerry McEntee, RCSI Fellow (1982) were about to carry out the first liver transplant in the country at St Vincent’s University Hospital (SVUH). “It was such an exciting day for the whole hospital,” recalls Professor Traynor. “The whole operation went smoothly and that patient is still alive nearly 30 years later, and continuing to do well.” Since then, the National Liver Transplant Programme, which Professor Traynor directed until 2014, has continued to save lives, caring for almost 1,500 patients to date. 6
Surgery became an obvious choice for Professor Traynor when he was studying medicine in University College Dublin (UCD). Initially, it was orthopaedics that lit the fire. “My first clinical placement in St Vincent’s was with the famous orthopaedic surgeon, Mr Jimmy Sheehan, RCSI Fellow. He was young, just back from the UK and this was the early 1970s when operations like hip replacements were brand new and he was bringing them to Ireland. The type of work he was doing was inspiring and caught my imagination,” says Professor Traynor. “I went on and did several other clinical placements in surgery – and I got more and more interested in it.” Back then, surgical training took longer than it typically does today, and Professor Traynor spent more than 13 years learning the craft. He moved to London, getting exposure to operations in busy hospitals at Ealing and Hammersmith. It was in the latter hospital that he met Professor Leslie Blumgart, a pioneer of liver surgery. “There were very few people in the world doing liver surgery in the late 1970s, and again that sparked my interest,” he says. Professor Traynor continued his training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA, and in Ireland before honing his expertise in the liver in Paris with Professor Henri Bismuth. By now it was the mid-1980s and the arrival of immunosuppressant drugs – most notably cyclosporine – was making liver transplants a safer and more effective option for patients, explains Professor Traynor. “Paris had the biggest programme in Europe for liver transplantation and it was an excellent place to learn,” he says.
