Surgical Oncology Rotation
Surgical Oncology in action
The Surgical Oncology Service is composed of six faculty and is a key component of the Wake Forest University National Cancer Institute designated Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The clinical service is comprised of six fellowship trained surgical oncologists and 4 surgical house officers, and 2-3 medical students. Annually, the six surgical oncologists perform over 1,000 major operative procedures and see approximately 7,500 outpatients in their new clinic in the cancer center building.
The House Staff (Residents) of the service are extensively involved in multimodality consultations for the care of cancer patients with cancer of the breast and the full spectrum of gastrointestinal malignancy from esophagus to anus, as well as melanoma and sarcoma.
In addition to operative management this includes pre-and post-operative care. Considerable clinical expertise is available to serve patients who require cancer staging, treatment, and follow-up due to primary, recurrent or metastatic malignancies. In addition to providing resection of primary lesions, a substantial portion of clinical effort is devoted to the resection of metastatic disease; including the liver, lung, peritoneum, and lymph nodes. Extensive clinical experience in a tertiary referral setting provides the surgical know-how for dealing with rare and unusual neoplasms. A weekly multidisciplinary/multimodality surgical oncology conference, which serves as the “Tumor Board” for the institution, meets every Friday at noon. Twice monthly (Tuesday at noon) the Hepatobiliary Conference reviews current cases in a multimodality format. The surgical oncology service coordinates the Multimodality Breast Care Clinical Meeting with twice-weekly (Wednesday and Friday) meetings to review cases presenting to clinic that day in a multimodality forum.
The Surgical Oncology Service actively supports clinical trials. Currently the faculty of the Surgical Oncology Service has over one million dollars in active extramural funding for cancer research. There is ample opportunity for research by residents and medical students.
