Challenges in surgical oncology training in Brazil: From history to a board-certified specialization

The Brazilian Society of Surgical Oncology was established over 30 years ago. Despite that, surgical oncology was finally recognized as a Board-Certified medical specialty in 2017 and has strengthened its role in the standardization of surgical and multimodal approaches in our country. This article aims to describe the process and the main challenges of the specialists training who are qualified for job opportunities and who meet the expectations of the recently created competence matrix for surgical oncologists in Brazil. Thus, we hope to expose the challenges of teaching surgical oncology, describe its history and experiences in important country services, and outline the minimum requirements for creating a more humanistic surgical oncologist who is updated and fully committed with multidisciplinary treatment for cancer patients. We conclude that the main characteristic that the surgical oncologist must have is the ability to offer holistic treatments to the patient, based on the highest level of evidence, love, and compassion, to direct the treatment and understand all of the afflictions that arise with a cancer diagnosis. Moreover, the surgical oncologist in training and in the field must be continuously updating himself to offer the best options of treatment to patients.