The 54-year-old is director of the clinic for neurosurgery at the Berlin Charité and a specialist in operations on the head and brain.
Dusseldorf Peter Vajkoczy’s first operation was what is known as the “appendix of neurosurgery”: bleeding between the top of the skull and the bones, in technical jargon “subdural hematoma”, in a 78-year-old woman. “Before the operation, I quickly read up on how it works,” says the doctor in the “Handelsblatt Rethink Work” podcast.
Today, the 54-year-old estimates that he has performed more than 20,000 operations and is a respected specialist in operations on the head, brain and spine. The son of Hungarian doctors who came to Germany in the mid-sixties was the youngest chief physician at the Berlin Charité in 2007 at the age of 37.
As director of the Clinic for Neurosurgery, he leads a team of 36 doctors who perform around 5,000 operations a year. Patients come to them from all over the world.
Peter Vajkoczy in an interview about empathy in brain surgery
The book author (“mental work”) is a sought-after expert, for example after Michael Schumacher’s skiing accident. In the podcast he talks about his craft and the relationship with his patients (“We make a promise”), but above all about the people behind the doctor and his feelings, such as the shame when complications arise or a patient dies.
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He is convinced: “Empathy cannot be swept away by professionalism.”
Vajkoczy tells how he went from being an “arrogant prat” to an emotional boss thanks to his mentor, who was something of a father figure for him, and what “humility” means to him. Although he was “in the tunnel and somehow alone” during an operation, he was in a bind without his team – sometimes there were up to 15 people with him in the operating room.
Neurosurgeon Peter Vajkoczy: “We can’t just step off the operating table”
And so Vajkoczy also deals intensively with the issues of a shortage of skilled workers and modern working models, but admits that the work-life balance in neurosurgery is reaching its limits (“We cannot simply step down from the operating table and someone else continues to operate”) . That’s the price he pays for his job, says the husband of an anesthetist and father of two daughters.
What drives him? The service to patients and his passion for neurosurgery, for the latest surgical technologies and research – and last but not least his fascination for the human brain: this, as he writes in his book, “shimmering white-pink-grey organ with its complex Anatomy” that offers “a highly aesthetic, completely bloodless and peaceful picture”.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here
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