Cambridge Neurosurgery Skull Base Fellowship

• Demonstrate a holistic approach to the management of patients skull base pathology – lateral and endscopic (including pituitary).
• Effectively work in an MDT setting.
• Evaluate treatment options and communicate these effectively with the patient, including potential outcomes and complications, and document these discussions accurately.
• Demonstrate microsurgical competence with lateral (anterior, anteriorlateral posterorolateral, trans-petrous, far lateral) and endoscopic surgical approaches.
• Demonstrate experience in critical appraisal of articles submitted to peer-reviewed journals.

Clinical competencies to be achieved:

• Ability to work within a multidisciplinary setting, and safely and appropriately manage skull base and pituitary pathologies, operatively and non-operatively.
• Ability to safely resect pituitary functioning/non-functioning lesions using the endoscope as a lead surgeon with appropriate assistance.
• Ability to effectively deal with intra-operative/post-operative complications, e.g. CSF, opthalmological, endocrinopathy, cranial neuropathy.
• Ability to safely resect skull base pathologies, including meningioma, vestibular schwannoma, and other less common lesions, and to deal with their potential complications.
• Supervision, teaching, training of junior neurosurgeons / CNPs

The number of main operations the fellow could expect to be involved in:

Vestibular schwannoma -  approx 50 cases

Meningioma -  approx 50 cases

Pituitary – approx. 60 cases

Other major skull base cases  (e.g. chordoma and other malignancies, trigeminal neuralgia, trauma, infection) - approx 50 cases