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The author maintained prospective records on every patient he treated during the 26 years of his neurosurgical private practice. At the conclusion of his clinical career, he compiled this information in a formal database program and then analyzed the Results for totals, trends, and interesting conclusions, which are presented herein.
There have been numerous studies and discussions of neurosurgery manpower issues, but few (if any) specific studies on the exact workload of individual neurosurgeons. General surveys have been made using approximate data from groups of neurosurgeons, but these are based for the most part on memory, rough approximations of caseloads, or in some cases on the workload over a brief period of time (for example, 1 month) extrapolated to longer periods. Unfortunately, this statistical technique may only exaggerate any intrinsic errors when the small numbers are multiplied to approximate the expected totals for a neurosurgeon's entire career.
The typical neurosurgeon has an approximate idea of the relative frequency of the different types of diseases treated and the associated operations performed. Nevertheless, the pressures of everyday practice normally preclude the maintenance of an exact accounting of total numbers and percentages, and sometimes one's memory is not accurate in assessing the details of reality.
I have kept exact records on every patient I have seen, treated, and performed surgery on during the 26 years of my career in private clinical practice. I have performed an analysis of these data, with interesting and specific Results that may prove helpful and/or interesting to other neurosurgeons.
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