A friend of mine told me that to be a professional programmer, you must dedicate at least 20 hours each week to professional development. That’s what Uncle Bob claims in his latest book, The Clean Coder, pointing to surgeons as an example of how to behave professionally.
The 20 hours figure intrigued me. My dad is an ENT surgeon, and he’s managed to keep up for 26 years in a field where “technology turns everything upside down about every two years.” He did the first half of his residency before endoscopes were in wide use, which required him to peel back the scalp and skin around the eyes in order to drill a hole into a patient’s sinus. Later, endoscopes gave him access to more parts of the body, while causing much less damage to the patient. Nowadays he uses the Fusion Navigator, which he describes as “a GPS for the body.” Impressively, he’s kept up with changing medical technology in the face of distractions such as living in a decompression chamber for a week as a part of his underwater medicine training; setting up hospitals in Thai jungles; and overseeing the medical support infrastructure for 15,000 Marines deployed to Iraq.
I asked him how he’s done it. What follows is what he told me. Of course, this is just one doctor, but I think my dad is an interesting data point for those developing a personal model for continuing education.
Observe other people at work
Dad stressed that this is the most important part of his multi-pronged approach to continuing education as a surgeon. He regularly sits in on other surgeries, observing the team’s preparation and procedure. He inevitably learns new techniques, new ways of looking at surgical problems, and how teams work together to pull off a surgery.
Attend at least one professional conference every year
Conferences create a high density population of surgeons to share ideas, and the planned presentations provide a structured way to learn about the latest happenings in the medical world.
Read high-quality material for at least 15 minutes each day
Dad reads for at least 15 minutes, every single day. When I questioned the possible depth and breadth of his reading, he said that he wasn’t reading to learn something in particular. He simply cultivates the habit of reading high quality medical information. He has a library full of textbooks and journals that he has “given up on the hope of reading everything in here…that’s just impossible.” So every day he sits down, grabs something from his library, and reads for at least 15 minutes. He puts it away when he’s done, and the next day reads something different.
Research to prepare for individual projects
While Dad hasn’t read everything in his library, he is familiar with what he can find in there, and knows where to look for specific information. So when he is assigned a surgery case, he reads the case information and then uses it to inform his research through his library. He digs up articles and reference materials that will be relevant to his case, along with materials from previous cases.