Hot topics at YUORDay22
The much anticipated YOURDay 2022 kicked off on Day 2 at EAU22 today, and was led by renowned experts ESRU Chair Dr. Francesco Esperto (IT) and YUO Chair Dr. Michiel Sedelaar (NL). Topics included a section on “Research and academic”, with presentations on how to cope with residency, women in academic urology and women in surgical urology.
In his presentation, “How to cope with residency and become a good consultant”, Dr. Esteban Emiliana (ES) shared his personal experience with burnout as a resident and the tools he used to overcome this.
“To cope with residency and become a good urologist you need to take care of yourself, then you can be creative and active. It is that simple. If you take care of yourself, you can then take care of your career, your patients and your team”.
According to Dr. Emiliana, urologists have one of the highest burnout rates amongst health-related jobs, alongside clinical care and emergency medicine.
Dr. Emiliani estimated that 40-75% of medical students and residents lead an unhealthy lifestyle. He relayed factors such as limited sleep, zero exercise, vending machine food, sun/nature deprived, too much social media, and sitting all day. He also mentioned the dangers of running on auto-pilot with negative thoughts.
Practising meditation and incorporating it into his daily life was a very successful tool for Dr. Emiliani, and he strongly recommends giving it a try. To keep healthy, he recommended getting eight hours sleep each night, avoiding screen time before bed, having some sun exposure and eating well.
In her presentation, “Women in academic urology”, Prof. Veronique Phé delivered an important message that having a mentor is vital for women to grow in their careers. “No mentor in junior or leadership positions, means no exposure to senior-level leadership, which gives you no preparation for senior positions, leading to no appropriate promotion.”
According to Prof. Phé, there is a lack of female representation as role models and mentors, and she believes that mentors are crucial in exposing a student to a particular career and in providing them with research opportunities.
“Women in urology are productive and active members of the academic community, to move forward, they need to exchange and promote themselves, be ambitious, and be proud!”
Dr. Anna Goujon (FR) presented “Women in surgical urology” on behalf of Dr. Stefania Ferretti (IT) as she had to perform surgery at the time.
According to Dr. Goujon, women in surgical urology remain a significant minority despite medicine’s closing gender gap. Just 7.7% of all practitioners are female, but in recent years, women have been selecting careers in urology at an increasing rate and by 2050, it is predicted that approximately 28% of practising urologists will be women. This increase in the number of women entering urology presents substantial progress towards equality.