Further training
Doctors go through three stages in their career: education, further training and advanced training. Further training to become a neurologist is diverse and currently lasts six years in total.
It is split into four stages:
- one year of inpatient clinical general internal medicine
- three to four years of clinical neurology
- one to two years of clinical neurophysiology and sleep medicine
- up to one year of research in the field of medicine or biomedicine, neuroradiology, neurosurgery, neuropaediatrics, psychiatry and psychotherapy, intensive care medicine or child and adolescent psychiatry and psychotherapy
Documents
Neurology further training programme
More basic information about further training can be found on theSIWFwebsite.
What is neurology all about?
Neurology deals with disorders of the entire nervous system – including the central nervous system (which the brain and spinal cord form part of) and the peripheral nervous system (which includes all the nerves outside of the skull and the spine).
Neurology also involves impairments of the vascular system and the muscular system. Neurologists treat diseases such as strokes, dementia, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, headaches, polyneuropathies and tumours of the nervous system.
Some good reasons why you should undergo further training in neurology
1. Growing numbers of people are reliant on neurological treatments!
Neurological diseases affect up to one billion people of all ages and from all over the world. Increased life expectancy has led to a global rise in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia and Parkinson’s disease. It would be fair to assume that the number of patients with neurological diseases will increase considerably in the future – in Switzerland too.
2. Rapid advances are being made thanks to neurological research
Thanks to the in-depth research conducted in past decades, nowadays there are successful treatments for many neurological diseases. In hardly any other medical field are such revolutionary advances being made in terms of diagnostic procedures and possible treatments as in neurology.
3. There is still lots to discover!
Despite the countless advances that have been made, there are still innumerable neurological diseases that we simply do not know enough about from a scientific standpoint. As a result, there is a lack of effective treatments for them. One reason for this is undoubtedly the complexity of the brain. It is made up of 85 billion neurons – and each of these neurons has tens of thousands of connections to neighbouring neurons and generates nearly a billion billion or a trillion (that is a one followed by 18 zeros) signals per second. At present, the complexity of the brain is simply beyond our comprehension. It is on a similar scale to the universe – so there is still lots to discover!
4. Neurology allows you to follow numerous career paths!
By completing further training in neurology, you can follow a very diverse range of interesting career paths – from hospital neurology, rehabilitation neurology and practice neurology to neurological research at universities or hospitals.