A FEW ASPECTS OF PLASTIC SURGEONS’ PERFORMANCE
In spite of accreditation programs, levels of professional skills vary among plastic surgeons: there are no requirements for the diversity and number of performed surgical interventions that a surgeon can specify in his/her portfolio. Rationale for elaborating such requirements can be explored by studying service reports of private medical practices certified to provide plastic surgery services to their in- and outpatients. In the course of out study we analyzed such reports using different statistical tools, including the variation coefficient, the Kolmogorov-Smironov, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests, and Spearman’s correlation coefficient. Differences were considered statistically significant at p < 0.05. Surgical interventions were divided into 9 categories: skin/soft tissue plasty, rhinoplasty, breast plasty, blepharoplasty, otoplasty, lip and palate repair, craniofacial plasty, repair of urogenital defects, and hand surgery. On average, each surgeon performed a total of 112.3 ± 326.4 surgeries (Мо = 1). About 30.4 % of surgeons performed 1 to 10 interventions a year. None of the surgeons performed all types of interventions and hand surgery. We found that the diversity and number of interventions performed by a surgeon does not depend on the qualification or academic title (r<sub>S</sub> = -0.8, р = 0.2 and r<sub>S</sub> = -0.2, р = 0.8, respectively). Skin/soft tissue repair accounted for 51.1 % of all services provided by private medical practices. The number of post-operative treatment services was 0.017 per surgery.