Five minutes with . . . Scarlett McNally, RCS council member

“The critical thing now is that we have just hit the landmark of 30% of surgical trainees being women. That’s a critical number because all those surgical trainees will be eligible to become consultant surgeons in the future. It’s fantastic news, and it shows that women do want to be surgeons. When I qualified in 1989 people assumed that women didn’t want to do surgery, but actually they do. This landmark has dispelled that myth.

“Things have changed in surgery during my career. It is now much more team based, and night time operating is now only for life threatening or limb threatening conditions. That change came about because of patient safety issues, but a byproduct of it has been that you don’t have to operate all night. It is a much friendlier way of working: you’re always working in teams, which is better than the historical macho image of the surgeon as the hero rushing around saving lives, not getting much sleep, and always being perfect.

“We need to encourage women into surgery because 57% of the people at medical school are women. Because it’s quite new having so many women in surgical training, we need to make people realise that less than full time (LTFT) training is an option and that the people who are doing LTFT training are doing it well and turning out to be excellent surgeons.

“Doctors have a whole range of experiences of surgery. For some of them the last time they saw a patient in a hospital was when they did their last house job. I don’t want senior doctors inadvertently putting off their trainees because they think it’s still like that. Things in surgery have changed so much.

“How we manage patients is changing; how care is delivered is changing all the time. The people who are coming through training now have to be diverse and flexible and able to adapt for the next 30 years.

“Surgery is a fun and rewarding career. You often see results very quickly, and you’re making a massive difference in a very small amount of time. We get laughed at: people say it’s like carpentry or plumbing, but you have something in your hands that you can make better, and usually the patient improves after that. It just all makes sense.”