Mateusz Gładysz

After plastic surgery specialty training at Hannover Medical School, my consultant-track training focused on two sub-specialty areas: microsurgical reconstruction and hand surgery. The microsurgical training was the Perth International Plastic and Reconstructive Fellowship at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. The hand surgery training came in the years that followed at Kantonsspital Aarau, in the Department of Plastic and Hand Surgery led by Prof. Jan Plock as Chefarzt — though my day-to-day clinical supervision came from PD Dr. Florian Früh as Leitender Arzt and Head of Hand Surgery, with whom I continue to consult on complex hand cases. The position was formally Oberarzt, but with daily clinical work concentrated almost entirely within the hand surgery team. In Switzerland, Handchirurgie is a sub-specialty separate from plastic surgery, and the Aarau years effectively served as a hand surgery fellowship period. The European Board of Hand Surgery Diploma examination, which requires at least one year of post-specialisation work in a pure hand-surgery scope, followed from that training.

Current clinical practice draws on both sub-specialties. The principal areas of work are hand surgery and the operative care of the upper extremity, and microsurgical reconstruction across the body. Within reconstructive practice, the surgical management of melanoma and complex skin cancer is a current area of clinical work, anchored by my role as Chair of the Melanoma and High-Risk Skin Cancer MDT at Waikato Hospital.

I studied medicine at the Medical University of Warsaw between 2008 and 2014, qualifying as lekarz in 2014. Postgraduate training began at the Military Institute of Medicine in Warsaw, where I completed the thirteen-month obligatory internship between October 2014 and October 2015.

Surgical foundation training followed at the University Hospital of Zurich, where I joined the Surgical Common Trunk programme in November 2015 under Prof. Pierre-Alain Clavien in the Department of Surgery and Transplantation. The two years in Zurich included rotations in general surgery, emergency medicine, and thoracic surgery, with the Surgical Basic Examination passed in November 2016. After completing the Zurich training in late 2017, I began plastic surgery specialty training at Hannover Medical School in March 2018, following German medical registration.

The Hannover years were the substantive plastic surgery training period. I worked in the Department of Plastic, Aesthetic, Hand and Reconstructive Surgery under Prof. Peter M. Vogt, across all four sub-specialty areas of European plastic surgery. The European Board examination (FEBOPRAS) was passed in November 2021, and the German Facharzt qualification in plastic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgery in June 2022.

A short observership followed in August 2022 with Prof. Joon Pio Hong at the Asan Medical Center in Seoul. From September 2022 to July 2023, I held the Perth International Plastic and Reconstructive Fellowship at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Western Australia, in the department led by Mr. Remo Papini — though my fellowship coordinator and principal microsurgery teacher was Mr. Duncan Taylor, who remains my microsurgery mentor.

Returning to Switzerland in October 2023, I joined the Department of Plastic and Hand Surgery at Kantonsspital Aarau as Oberarzt, working primarily within the hand surgery team. The European Board of Hand Surgery Diploma examination (FEBHS) was passed in June 2025, completing the formal credentialing in the second sub-specialty.

Since September 2025, I have been Senior Medical Officer and Consultant in the Department of Plastic Surgery at Waikato Hospital in Hamilton, New Zealand.

My doctoral research at the University of Zurich examined AI-assisted clinical documentation in multilingual healthcare settings. The thesis is supervised by Prof. Pietro Giovanoli at UZH as formal Doktorvater; the underlying clinical work was conducted at Kantonsspital Aarau under the academic supervision of Prof. Jan Plock, where the AI-scribe systems were developed and evaluated during my time there as Oberarzt. The proof-of-concept study compared four documentation workflows — including ambient AI-assisted dictation — and was particularly interested in how non-native German-speaking clinicians manage documentation burden in a Swiss tertiary hospital. The findings were published in JMIR AI in 2026.

Earlier clinical work during the Hannover years included the European Burn Journal case report on intermediate wound coverage with NovoSorb BTM in persistent Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection — a limb-salvage case that illustrated where dermal scaffold templates can extend the reconstructive options in heavily contaminated wounds.

The selected publications block on the home page lists current peer-reviewed output, and the publications archive carries the full record.

Consultations are conducted in English, Polish, and German. Working in five different healthcare systems — Polish, Swiss, German, Australian, and now New Zealand — has shaped a clinical practice that adapts readily to new environments and structures. The same surgical problem is approached differently in different systems; seeing those differences from the inside, rather than reading about them, makes the underlying judgement more transferable. The questions a patient asks first often tell more than the questions they have prepared, and that observation translates across languages and cultures.