Assoc.Prof. Hasan Ersoz, MD

Then, due to the special situation of his family, he returned to his hometown by winning Dicle University Faculty of Medicine with a score that could have won Hacettepe Medicine in the university entrance exam. The last year of his 6-year medical education coincided with the period when his father started to experience lung disease. For this reason, with an idealistic approach, he was interested in becoming a Thoracic Surgeon and being the best in this field. Although he got a high score in his first Specialty exam, he voluntarily chose this department, which was usually chosen by his colleagues with low scores, and headed to Izmir, Dokuz Eylül University, the city where he would make a living.

 

Who could have known that in Izmir, where he came as a resident, he would establish a fully equipped fourth clinic in addition to the three thoracic surgery clinics that existed at that time, and that he would be the Head of a Department that would change the fate of Izmir in this field?

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After a successful 5-year of being resident, he completed his compulsory service in Tepecik Training and Research Hospital, also in Izmir, due to the residency status of his wife, who was a physician like him. Those who know Izmir know that while there is Suat Seren Chest Diseases Hospital directly opposite Tepecik Hospital, no one applies to Tepecik Hospital for chest diseases. Hasan started to be approached only by patients who were too risky to be operated on and who had additional diseases at an advanced age, and when they were told that they could not be operated on at Suat Seren Hospital, they started to say "let's ask the other side".

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Hasan ERSÖZ, who had his first specialty experience in such an environment, bravely undertook the risks and difficulties of these patients and operated on them without refusing any of them. His good results started to attract attention. He was offered by the Dean's Office of Kâtip Çelebi University at the time, "Would you like to establish a much more comprehensive clinic at Atatürk Training and Research Hospital, than what you have accomplished in this hospital in one and a half years?" He did not remain unresponsive. Because this department had never been established in Atatürk Training and Research Hospital, the oldest hospital in Izmir, and it was a great deficiency for such an important hospital. It was not easy for them to find a professor who could take on this challenge and accomplish this work. Dr. ERSÖZ, who was passionate about his job and loved excitement, accepted this difficult task without blinking an eye.

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After a short-term experience at Manisa State Hospital due to the completion of his wife's term in Izmir and the bureaucratic delay of his transfer to Kâtip Çelebi University, he returned to Izmir again, this time with the titles of "Assistant Professor" and "Head of the Department of Thoracic Surgery - Founding Faculty Member".

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When he started his new position, he knew how difficult his job was because the clinic did not even have a pair of scissors. He did not even have a secretary to handle the necessary correspondence for the establishment of the clinic. Everyone around him asked him, "Why did you go to this department? There is no previous surgery, no patient records, no database... How are you going to publish? How will you become an associate professor?". But he never hid behind excuses. He worked and strived. He had to explain his projects and plans to each new administration at the university and hospital, which constantly changed chief physicians, deans and rectors with the winds of bureaucracy. Because each incoming administration approached him with suspicion and distrust due to the fact that he was the head of the department at a young age. However, he managed to gain the trust of each administration with his persistent hard work and the services he created.

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First, he rolled up his sleeves by learning the EBYS system to do correspondence. On the one hand, he was begging the administrations to buy all the deficiencies of the clinic, taking care of correspondence and bureaucratic affairs, and on the other hand, in the clinic without a service, he was performing surgeries by putting his patients in beds of other services, and also trying to complete his publications by conducting animal experiments in the clinic without a database in order to become an associate professor. While doing all this, he was also teaching thoracic surgery courses to the students of Kâtip Çelebi University Faculty of Medicine alone.

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Moreover, he did not interrupt his own development in this busy environment. In January 2019, he visited Dr. Diego Gonzales Rivas, the pioneer of closed lung surgery in Shanghai-China. Due to his close friendship with him, he learned all the technical secrets from Diego.

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When he returned, everyone told him that he should perform fifty surgeries with a mentor, but the fact that the mentor went to the USA upon receiving an offer there did not discourage him. He continued on his way without a mentor and started to perform these surgeries successfully without complications. He had already reached the mentioned number of fifty on his own in a very short time. Although he was offered to give a speech on "How did I succeed without a mentor?" at a symposium, he did not accept the speech because he was afraid of the reaction of the community on this issue.

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His publications on animal experiments were so successful that he received support from TÜBİTAK projects and was published in very high quality journals (especially in international journals belonging to the Oxford University Library (which is a great prestige even to publish a publication in these journals) and in very high quality journals (journals of Japan and other leading countries in science) and received a high number of citations and letters of praise.

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In 2020, he was only 35 years old when he was awarded the title of "Associate Professor". But this feeling was not surprising for him. Because we are talking about a physician who became a "Doctor" at the age of twenty-three, a "specialist" at the age of twenty-eight, an "Assistant Professor" and a "Head of Department and Clinic Chief" at the age of thirty-one. In the international symposium he organized in 2020 on pectus deformities (chest deformities), which is his special field of interest, he gathered many internationally renowned doctors from every city in Turkey and from countries such as Italy, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to his clinic and performed live surgeries and trained these doctors.

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At the end of the 6.5-year challenging experience at Izmir Kâtip Çelebi University; his clinic, which did not even have scissors before, was now a fully equipped clinic with its own service and all its staff, accredited by the Board of Medical Specialization, which started to provide thoracic surgery specialty training, that is, with residents, 2 Associate Professors, 1 Dr. Faculty Member (formerly Assistant Professor), 2 Specialists and 2 Resident Doctors. It is one of the two centers in the Aegean Region where Pectus Deformities are operated, the only place where non-surgical treatment is performed, the place where closed thoracic surgery (VATS) is performed, the 4th thoracic surgery clinic in Izmir. Thoracic surgery clinic, one of the rare places where the complicated surgery called "carinal sleeve pneumonectomy" was performed, the fifth place in the world where bronchial fistula repair was performed with an ASD umbrella, the fifth place in the world where pectus deformity surgery was performed with cross bar, the second place in the world where pectus repair was performed with 4 bars and achieved numerous international and national achievements as a clinic and as a physician. Of course, all these surgeries had his signature...

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Afterwards, he thought that the difficulties of practicing medicine in state hospitals in recent years, the bureaucratic and academic games of life, and other things he was struggling with outside his profession were wasting his energy. He decided to open his own private clinic and devote all his energy to his profession and his patients. Who knows, maybe he wanted to seek excitement in a new medium with the satisfaction of being the head of the department in Turkey's third largest city at the age of 31 and the success he achieved in every field of academics. With his courageous temperament, he resigned from Izmir Kâtip Çelebi University Faculty of Medicine, Department of Thoracic Surgery, where he had worked for years, where he was the founder and head of the department for 6.5 years, although he was only 37 years old, without even blinking an eye, and started to practice his profession in his own private clinic since October 2022.

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Dr. Ersoz is married and has two children.