Nottingham: ‘Sometimes people don’t see me as the surgeon’

Elena’s path to becoming a surgeon in an emergency department was not an easy one.

As a teenager, she set her sights on studying medicine in the UK.

“I had to do [the A-levels] in my own spare time, and obviously coming from a foreign country to the UK, you had to have top marks to even be considered for medicine,” she says.

“So it was a tough four or five years before even coming to medical school.”

Aged 18, she moved to London and began studying to be a doctor. Eventually, came the opportunity to specialise in surgery.

“Unfortunately, my surgical placements were all with, let’s say, school surgeons who would have different mentalities to what we have today,” she says.

She says she faced “unprofessional behaviours, in terms of bullying and toxic environments”.

“I guess we’re quite lucky in this day and age that things have changed in terms of professional contact and how people should be behaving, and especially when it comes to treating patients and colleagues,” she says.

“I know I’ve had a lot of difficulties that probably if I wasn’t a woman I wouldn’t have had, and I’m sure quite a lot of trainees, especially female trainees, would agree with this statement.”

Elena, however, has high praise for her colleagues at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham.

“We are quite lucky in the East Midlands because we are one of the deaneries that have quite a lot of female trainees, and especially female consultants in surgery, who I’ve had as role models,” she says.