Hi, I am new here and have my 1st appt on Friday with my Primary Care Dr to discuss gastric sleeve, just wondering how do you find a good surgeon?

any websites I can use, or do I go by my Dr's recommendation? thank you! looking forward to chatting with you all.

One way to go about it is to look at the major, respected hospital systems in your area and compare programs - attend an information session. This is what I did. I am in the Greater Philadelphia Area and the two most respected systems are Christiana Care and Penn Medicine. Of the two, I ended up going with Christiana Care because they had more rigorous work-up requirements. I needed 3 life skills classes, a psychological eval, an Upper GI and Abdominal study, a lung function test, and a cardiac stress test. I felt that I was in safer hands. The staff at Christiana Care have also been a pleasure to deal with. I also looked at after care, knowing this would be important as well.

Since this is a life altering experience, you should have no doubts as to the competence of the surgeon whom you will be working with. If you have even an inkling of doubt, it's time to look elsewhere.

Edited January 31, 20188 yr by Mattymatt

I agree with Mattymatt, my area of Ohio is lucky that all 3 hospitals offering surgeries in Columbus-Ohio State University, Riverside Methodist and,mine Mount Carmel are ranked as Bariatric Centers of Excellence. When you plan for something this life changing you want to seek the best.

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I started with a recommendation from my PCP, which ultimately I went with. I did some reading on how centers are ranked and what makes a center more or less successful. There’s a bariatric surgery accredidation that grades centers and the best ones have certain characteristics. Some of them I recall as being more than 300 surgeries per year, have a tracking system in place for their own stats, have specialized treatment units or floors and a bunch of other things. I found a list of ones near me and it turned out the one the PCP recommended was on the list too.