Hernia & Abdominal Wall Surgery — Specialty Profile

Exploratory, not prescriptive. This profile blends hard data (pay, match rates, burnout, demographics, each sourced and dated) with generalizations and synthesized opinion about culture and "who fits." It's here to help you get curious and go find out for yourself, not to tell you who to become. Numbers marked ⟳ verify change every year; check the linked source before you quote one. Last reviewed: 2026-08-04.

Also called: abdominal wall reconstruction, AWR, complex hernia surgery, abdominal core health. A 1-year Fellowship Council-accredited fellowship entered after a general surgery residency, without ACGME accreditation or a board certificate. Organ system: the abdominal wall, which most of medicine treats as packaging rather than as an organ.

Subspecialty fellowship of General Surgery.

The 30-second version

Hernia repair is among the most commonly performed operations in America, and this subspecialty exists because it is frequently done badly. Roughly 350,000 ventral and 800,000 inguinal hernia repairs happen in the United States each year, nearly all by general surgeons with no specific hernia training, and recurrence after complex repair has historically been common enough to generate a population of patients on their third and fourth operation. The response was unusual. Instead of petitioning for a board certificate, the field built a registry: the Abdominal Core Health Quality Collaborative, founded in 2013, now holding data on more than 150,000 patients from over 500 surgeons and supporting more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. The fellowship followed, sponsored by the Fellowship Council with the American Hernia Society and SAGES, and it is still not ACGME-accredited and still leads to no American Board of Surgery certificate. The trade at the center: an elective, high-volume, robotics-forward practice with an unusually good lifestyle for general surgery, credentialed by outcomes data rather than by a board.

Quick dashboard (details and sources below)


Training after med school	6 years (5 yr general surgery residency + 1 yr hernia/AWR fellowship)
Total from college start	~14 years (4 undergrad + 4 med school + 5 residency + 1 fellowship)
Training chain	Med school (4) → General surgery (5) → 1-yr Fellowship Council hernia/AWR fellowship → no board certificate
Competitiveness	Low. A small number of programs, most taking one fellow, and no board to gate entry ⟳
Typical full-time pay	No benchmark isolates it. Parent general surgery runs ~$440,000–$485,000 ⟳
Pay vs. parent (general surgery)	At or above, since the practice is elective, high-volume, and RVU-dense ⟳
Lifestyle	Elective and schedulable, with far less emergency work than general surgery ⟳
Burnout	No subspecialty figure; parent general surgery ~43.8% ⟳
% women	No subspecialty figure; parent general surgery 24% practicing, 49.9% of residents ⟳
DO / IMG accessibility	Good by surgical standards: 19.1% DO and 11.8% IMG of categorical surgery positions filled in the 2026 Match ⟳

What they actually do

Complex ventral and incisional hernia is the core of the practice. These are the patients whose previous repairs failed, whose defects are large, and whose abdominal walls have lost the ability to close without help.

Retromuscular repair is the technical foundation. Placing mesh in the plane behind the rectus muscle, the Rives-Stoppa approach and its descendants, is the technique most of the field now considers the standard for complex ventral hernia, and it is what separates the fellowship-trained repair from the one done at the community hospital.

Transversus abdominis release and component separation are the methods for hernias too large to close directly. These operations divide layers of the abdominal wall in a controlled way to advance the fascia toward the midline, and they are the technical heart of abdominal wall reconstruction.

Robotic surgery has moved into this field faster than into most of general surgery. Robotic component separation is associated with lower postoperative complication rates, shorter stays, and fewer readmissions than the open approach in comparative studies, and the platform has changed what can be done minimally invasively.¹ ⟳

Mesh selection and mesh complications are a running preoccupation. Mesh reduces recurrence and raises infection risk, the trade is real, and the field spends a great deal of energy on which material goes in which plane in which patient.² A meaningful part of the practice is managing mesh that has failed, become infected, or eroded.

Prehabilitation is a distinctive and underappreciated half of the job. Elective complex repair is frequently delayed for months while the surgeon works on smoking cessation, weight loss, and glycemic control, because those variables drive outcomes more than technique does. Telling a patient they are not yet a candidate, and then helping them become one, is routine here.

The rest of the practice: inguinal hernia including complex and recurrent repair, parastomal hernia, enterocutaneous fistula with abdominal wall loss, hernias with loss of domain, diastasis recti, and abdominal wall reconstruction after trauma or oncologic resection.

Representative work: complex ventral and incisional hernia repair · retromuscular and Rives-Stoppa mesh repair · transversus abdominis release · anterior and posterior component separation · robotic ventral hernia repair and robotic component separation · mesh selection, mesh infection, and mesh explant · recurrent and complex inguinal hernia · parastomal hernia · enterocutaneous fistula takedown with abdominal wall reconstruction · hernias with loss of domain, including botulinum toxin and preoperative pneumoperitoneum · prehabilitation and risk optimization · diastasis recti.³

A day in the life: an elective operative practice with a heavy clinic. Cases are scheduled, often long, frequently robotic, and rarely urgent. Clinic is a mix of consultations for complex repair, prehabilitation follow-up, and postoperative care that runs longer than most surgical follow-up because recurrence is a long-term outcome. Many practitioners in this field are also active in the registry, which means their own outcomes are measured and compared.

On call: light for general surgery. Incarcerated and strangulated hernias are emergencies, but most of this practice is elective and the emergency version is usually handled by whoever is on for general surgery.

The training path & time to completion

Medical school (4 yrs) → general surgery residency (5 yrs) → 1-year hernia and abdominal wall surgery fellowship → no board certificate exists.⁴⁵

The fellowship runs through the Fellowship Council, co-sponsored by the American Hernia Society and SAGES, and began as a pilot with an initial cohort of eight programs carrying the hernia and abdominal wall designation.⁴ ⟳
It is not ACGME-accredited, and the American Board of Surgery offers no certificate in hernia or abdominal wall surgery. Programs describe themselves plainly as non-ACGME.⁵ ⟳
Many programs bundle it with minimally invasive surgery. A common configuration is an advanced GI, MIS, and hernia fellowship in one year, which broadens the training and dilutes it depending on the program.⁵
Programs are small, typically one fellow per year.⁵ ⟳
Total from the start of college: about 14 years.

What the missing board means in practice. Any general surgeon can repair a hernia, and almost all of them do, so this fellowship confers technique and judgment rather than permission. Its value is demonstrated through case volume, referral patterns, and registry participation. That makes it one of the clearest examples in the Sky of a subspecialty defined by what its members do rather than by what they are certified to do, and anyone considering it should be clear that they are buying skill and a network rather than a credential.

How competitive is it?

The parent residency is the meaningful filter. General surgery is competitive, long, and carries roughly 20% residency attrition.⁶ ⟳
The fellowship is small and not heavily oversubscribed, with a limited number of designated programs mostly taking one fellow each.⁴⁵ ⟳
There is no board examination, so there is no diplomate count, no pass rate, and no published workforce census for this field. It is measurably less measured than its ACGME siblings. ⟳
The clinical demand is enormous and growing. Roughly 350,000 ventral and 800,000 inguinal hernia repairs a year in the United States, an aging and heavier population, and a large accumulated pool of patients with failed previous repairs.⁷ ⟳

The honest read. Getting through general surgery is the hard part. This fellowship is available to those who want it, and the competition is for the specific programs with high complex-reconstruction volume and robotic access, because that is where the training value is concentrated.

Board: none. American Board of Surgery certification in general surgery is the only board credential a hernia surgeon holds.⁵

Compensation — the robust version

No compensation survey isolates hernia and abdominal wall surgery, and with no board certificate there is no certified population to survey.

The parent anchor. General surgery runs roughly $440,000–$485,000 nationally.⁶ ⟳

Why this practice should sit at or above that, structurally. Hernia surgery is elective, schedulable, and high-volume, which is the combination that produces predictable relative value unit generation. Complex abdominal wall reconstruction is well reimbursed for the operative time it takes. The practice carries little of the uncompensated emergency burden that suppresses general surgery's effective hourly earnings. And a surgeon with a reputation for complex repair receives referrals from a wide catchment, because the patients who need this have usually already failed elsewhere.

The robotic caveat. Robotic hernia repair takes longer than open repair in many hands and carries substantial equipment costs, so the economics depend heavily on institutional arrangements rather than on the surgeon's productivity alone. Ask specifically how robot time is allocated and costed before assuming a robotic practice is a lucrative one. ⟳

What is genuinely uncertain. Without a survey line, the size of any premium over general surgery is unknown. The structural case above is an inference from practice patterns rather than a measurement, and it should be treated that way.

Limited-data caveat: no MGMA, Doximity, or Medscape line isolating hernia or abdominal wall surgery was located. Benchmark against general surgery in the same market, and ask about elective case volume, robot access, and whether complex reconstruction referrals actually materialize before valuing the fellowship. ⟳

Lifestyle

Among the best lifestyles available in general surgery, and this is the field's strongest and least-discussed selling point.
The practice is elective, so the operating schedule is genuinely a schedule.
Call is light, because incarcerated hernias mostly reach whoever covers general surgery emergencies.
Cases are long but planned, which is a different burden from unpredictable ones.
Clinic is substantial, including prehabilitation follow-up that has no surgical equivalent in most fields.
Geographic flexibility is good. Hernias exist everywhere, and a complex reconstruction practice is viable in any mid-sized market with a referral base.
Robotic access shapes the job, so where you work determines how you operate more than in most subspecialties.

Lifestyle rating: 4/5. Elective, schedulable, and low on emergencies, which is close to the ceiling for a surgical field, deducted for long operative days and a clinic load that includes a lot of patient management before anyone reaches an operating room.

Wellbeing — the part to take seriously

No subspecialty-specific figure was located. Inherit parent general surgery at roughly 43.8% burnout, against an all-physician average near 41.9%.⁶ ⟳

The recurrence problem is the field's defining professional stress and it is also its reason for existing. Hernias come back. Complex repairs come back at rates that are unacceptable to the surgeons who do them, and the honest ones tell patients so before operating. Living with a long-term failure rate you can measure but not eliminate requires a particular temperament.

The registry culture changes the emotional texture of the work. When your outcomes are entered into a national database and benchmarked against peers, failure is visible in a way it is not in most of surgery. Practitioners describe this as the healthiest thing about the field and as a source of real pressure, and both are true.

The redo patient is the field's characteristic clinical relationship. People arrive angry, in pain, and having been failed once or several times, sometimes carrying infected mesh from an operation someone else did. Absorbing that and building trust is a large part of the consultation.

The prehabilitation conversation is a recurring hard one. Telling a patient in genuine discomfort that they must lose weight or stop smoking before you will operate is medically correct and frequently heard as a refusal, and it happens most often to patients whose circumstances make those changes hardest.

The compensating satisfaction is unusually concrete. A person who could not stand upright, or who had been living with an open abdomen, gets their abdominal wall back. It is mechanical, visible, and durable when it works.

Who's in the field (demographics)

No subspecialty-specific demographic data was located, and the reason is structural: no board certificate means no diplomate registry to count. Inherit general surgery.

Women: 24% of practicing general surgeons (AAMC, 2022 data) and 49.9% of current residents (ACGME, AY2024-25), so the pipeline is shifting fast and is now at parity.⁶ ⟳
DO: 19.1% of the categorical surgery positions filled in the 2026 Match, 344 of 1,804, which is friendlier than most surgical specialties.⁶ ⟳
IMG: 11.8% of the same 1,804, 85 US-citizen international graduates and 128 non-US. Positions filled is the denominator for both shares.⁶ ⟳
Underrepresented in medicine: no subspecialty figure. Obesity, diabetes, smoking, and prior emergency abdominal surgery all drive hernia risk and all track socioeconomic disadvantage, so this field's patient population is skewed toward people the health system has already treated poorly. ⟳
The measured population is patients rather than surgeons. The field's registry holds more than 150,000 patients contributed by over 500 surgeons, which is a better census of the work than anything that exists of the workforce.⁸ ⟳

Culture, personality & the online stereotypes

Who gravitates here: general surgery residents who liked the abdominal wall and the robot, and who are drawn to a measurable, technique-driven problem. The field is data-forward, socially cohesive, and unusually collegial for surgery, largely because the registry made shared outcomes normal. It skews toward people who want an elective practice with real technical depth. As always, plenty of people in the field do not fit any single mold.

The stereotypes. Community perception rather than fact, each with a kernel and an unfair edge:

"A fellowship to do what every general surgeon already does." The field's standing challenge, and its answer is the recurrence data and the redo population.
"The lifestyle fellowship." Broadly true and rarely held against it.
"Mesh salesmen." Unfair, and it reflects genuine industry involvement in a device-heavy field.
"They made a registry instead of a board." Accurate, and members generally regard it as the better choice.

What people say online (synthesized and paraphrased, not quotes): across trainee and physician forums, hernia surgery reads as the practical, underrated choice. The dominant recurring theme is lifestyle, discussed as the best available in general surgery without leaving the abdomen. A second is the absence of a board, treated as a genuine weakness for credentialing and largely irrelevant to practice. A third is the robot, described as central and as a reason to choose a fellowship with real access. A fourth is the registry, discussed with unusual warmth as something that made the field better. The tone is pragmatic and quietly enthusiastic.

Voices from the field. Paraphrased from published sources, with links to the originals:

The Fellowship Council, with the American Hernia Society and SAGES, sponsors the hernia and abdominal wall surgery fellowship designation, which began as a pilot with an initial cohort of eight programs.⁴
The Abdominal Core Health Quality Collaborative reports surpassing 150,000 patients in its registry, contributed by more than 500 surgeons, with more than 200 peer-reviewed publications since its founding in 2013.⁸

Why people choose it / why people leave

Why choose it: one of the best lifestyles in general surgery, elective and schedulable · genuine technical depth in a field that rewards it · robotics at the leading edge of adoption · enormous and growing clinical demand · geographic freedom, because hernias exist everywhere · a data culture that measures outcomes honestly · a concrete, visible result when it works.

Why leave or avoid it: no board certificate and no ACGME accreditation · a recurrence rate you can measure and cannot eliminate · a redo population that arrives angry and previously failed · prehabilitation conversations that feel like refusals to the patient · dependence on institutional robot access · an unproven pay premium over general surgery · a field where any general surgeon is a competitor.

Best fit if: you want an elective surgical practice with technical depth · the robot appeals · you like measurable outcomes and are willing to be measured · you want to stay in the abdomen without the emergency burden · you can hold a long conversation with a patient who is not yet a candidate.

Not for you if: you need a board certificate · you want emergency surgery and variety · long-term recurrence would eat at you · you want a field with a clear credentialing moat.

The FLI angle — Hernia & abdominal wall surgery for first-gen, low-income & immigrant students

Where it fits FLI realities well:

General surgery is one of the more accessible surgical residencies, at 19.1% DO and 11.8% IMG of the categorical positions filled in the 2026 Match, and this fellowship adds one year rather than two or three.⁶ For a surgical career reachable without the pedigree that orthopedics or ENT demand, this is a real route.
The lifestyle is genuinely sustainable, which matters if you will be supporting family or are the first person in yours with a demanding professional job.
Geography is yours. A hernia practice works in any mid-sized market, so staying near family is compatible with this career.
The patient population is people like the ones you may have grown up around. Obesity, diabetes, smoking, and previous emergency surgery drive this disease, and those cluster where money does not. The prehabilitation conversation lands very differently from a surgeon who understands why someone cannot simply stop working nights and lose thirty pounds.

Risks to name honestly:

You are buying a network rather than a credential, and networks are exactly what FLI trainees most often lack. With no board, your value is demonstrated through where you trained, who refers to you, and what your registry numbers look like. Mentorship is not optional here, it is the mechanism.
The pay premium is unproven. The structural case for earning at or above general surgery is reasonable and unmeasured.⁶ Do not take this year on the assumption of a raise.
Robot access is an institutional lottery. The value of the fellowship depends on operating at a place that will give you robot time, and junior surgeons are last in that queue. Ask about it in every interview.
Five years of general surgery residency is brutal, with roughly 20% attrition.⁶ That is the real cost of this path and it is paid before the fellowship is a question.

Bottom line for FLI: among the most livable surgical careers reachable through one of the more accessible surgical residencies, with real technical depth and geographic freedom. The catch is that it is credentialed socially rather than formally, which rewards connections, and the financial upside over plain general surgery has never been measured. Choose it for the practice, not for the premium.

Fun facts

Americans undergo roughly 350,000 ventral and 800,000 inguinal hernia repairs a year, and there is no board certificate in hernia surgery.⁷
The field's answer to that gap was a registry rather than a board. The Abdominal Core Health Quality Collaborative has grown from its 2013 founding to more than 150,000 patients, over 500 contributing surgeons, and more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.⁸
The fellowship designation began as a pilot with eight programs, sponsored by the Fellowship Council with the American Hernia Society and SAGES.⁴
Mesh lowers recurrence and raises infection risk, and choosing between those two failures in a given patient is much of what the subspecialty argues about.²
Some hernias are too large for the abdomen to accept back, and the preparations include botulinum toxin to relax the abdominal wall and deliberately inflating the abdomen before surgery.
Robotic component separation is associated with fewer complications, shorter stays, and fewer readmissions than the open operation in comparative studies.¹

Sources

Robotic approaches. "Robotic versus open component separation: A retrospective cohort and propensity score analysis of complication rates and clinical outcomes," PLOS One — robotic component separation was associated with lower postoperative complication rates, shorter hospital stays, and fewer readmissions compared with the open approach. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0347763 (accessed 2026). See also "Robotic Ventral Hernia Repair and Endoscopic Component Separation: Outcomes," https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28951658/. ⟳ ↩ ↩²
Mesh and recurrence. "Mesh placement and the risk of recurrence and ileus in primary ventral hernia repair: A systematic review and network meta-analysis," Surgery — mesh use is associated with lower recurrence risk and higher infection risk. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039606025007147 (accessed 2026). See also "Large and complex ventral hernia repair using components separation technique without mesh results in a high recurrence rate," https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24933669/. ⟳ ↩ ↩²
Clinical scope. Composite of published US hernia and abdominal wall reconstruction fellowship curricula, which consistently cover complex ventral and incisional hernia, retromuscular and Rives-Stoppa repair, transversus abdominis release and component separation, robotic ventral hernia repair, mesh selection and mesh complications, parastomal hernia, enterocutaneous fistula with abdominal wall loss, loss of domain, and preoperative risk optimization. Cleveland Clinic (https://my.clevelandclinic.org/departments/digestive/medical-professionals/education/abdominal-wall-reconstruction-fellowship), Penn State (https://med.psu.edu/residencies-fellowships/professional-programs/hernia-and-abdominal-wall-fellowship), Stony Brook (https://renaissance.stonybrookmedicine.edu/surgery/education/postgraduate/residency/abdominal-wall-reconstruction-fellowship), and Luminis Health (https://www.luminishealth.org/en/academics/gme-programs/fellowship-abdominal-wall-reconstruction), accessed 2026. ↩
Fellowship sponsorship and designation. The Fellowship Council sponsors the Hernia and Abdominal Wall Surgery fellowship designation, co-sponsored by the American Hernia Society and SAGES, which began as a pilot with an initial cohort of eight participating programs. Fellowship Council directory of fellowships (https://www.fellowshipcouncil.org/directory-of-fellowships/) and UAB's announcement of receiving the hernia designation (https://www.uab.edu/medicine/surgery/news-and-events/department-news/2054-uab-gi-fellowship-receives-hernia-designation), accessed 2026. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Accreditation status and program structure. Programs describe the fellowship as one year, non-ACGME-accredited, and accredited through the Fellowship Council, typically taking one fellow per year, and frequently combined with advanced GI and minimally invasive surgery training. University of Tennessee (https://com.utmck.edu/surgery/fellowship/abdominalwall.cfm) and UAB Advanced GI/MIS/Hernia and Abdominal Wall Fellowship (https://bb.uab.edu/medicine/surgery/gastrointestinal/education/mis-fellowship), accessed 2026. The American Board of Surgery offers no subspecialty certificate in hernia or abdominal wall surgery. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Parent-field figures for general surgery. Typical comp ~$440k–$485k, ~60–66 hrs/week with heavy call and low early-career schedule control, and residency attrition ~20%: see the general surgery profile on this site. Burnout: Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2024, n=9,226, fielded July–October 2023, paywalled and returning HTTP 402, so its specialty rows reach this page through one relay that reprints them: Healthgrades Pro (https://resources.healthgrades.com/pro/the-most-and-least-burned-out-physicians-by-specialty), which publishes twenty of the report's twenty-six rows. Advisory Board's write-up of the same report (https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2024/01/31/physician-burnout) agrees on the edition and the instrument and carries no specialty table, so it corroborates the report rather than the row. Women in practice: AAMC, "Women are changing the face of medicine in America" (2022 data), https://www.aamc.org/news/women-are-changing-face-medicine-america. Women in training: ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, Table C.21, https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/publicationsbooks/2024-2025_acgme_databook_document.pdf. DO and IMG shares: NRMP, Results and Data: 2026 Main Residency Match, May 2026, Table 2, https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Main_Match_Results_and_Data-2026.pdf. One figure here is an instrument choice rather than a source disagreement, and it is named rather than buried. Burnout: this page says ~43.8% for general surgery against an all-physician average of 41.9%, with emergency medicine ~49.8% and urology ~49.5%, which comes from AMA, These 9 physician specialties report highest burnout rates (2025 Organizational Biopsy, ~19,000 responses across 38 states), https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/these-9-physician-specialties-report-highest-burnout-rates; Medscape 2024 is a separate instrument and puts general surgery at 45% against an all-physician average of 49%, emergency medicine at 63% and urology at 49%. The two baselines sit seven points apart and never belong in the same sentence. Corrected 2026-08-17: this footnote told the reader that the 43.8% figure came from a "2025 field year" set no publisher on this site could point to. There is one, and the general surgery profile cites it; the same footnote text on the hepatopancreatobiliary surgery profile was corrected on 2026-08-13 and this copy was not, so the page printed 43.8% in the dashboard and in Wellbeing while its own footnote said the number could not be sourced. Three further figures sat in the body while this note recorded that its own sources said otherwise, in seven places including two dashboard rows. All three are now in the body. Women in practice is AAMC's 24% for general surgery (2022 data), not the ~22.6% previously carried. Women in training is Table C.21's 5,024 of 10,074 surgery residents, 49.9%, not ~45–48%. DO and IMG are the 2026 Match's 344 of 1,804 filled categorical surgery positions (19.1%) and 213 of 1,804 (11.8%), not the ~14.7% and ~12.1% previously quoted. Those two were also mismatched against each other: 14.7% was 2025's US-DO-seniors share on a positions-offered denominator, while 12.1% was 2025's all-IMG share on a positions-filled one, and the true 2025 DO total was 16.8%. Sweeping only the year would have left that mismatch standing. The denominator throughout is now positions filled. A further correction to this note, 2026-08-17: it claimed the Medscape rows reach this page through "three independent relays" and then named two. Only one of the two publishes a specialty table at all. The AMA link later in this note is a different instrument rather than a relay of Medscape, so it was never the third. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
Procedure volume, from two StatPearls chapters, each quoted for its own operation. Ventral: "Annually, there are about 350,000 ventral hernia operations," and, in the same chapter's Epidemiology section, "In 2006, 348,000 ventral hernia repairs were performed in the United States." Smith J, Parmely JD, "Ventral Hernia," StatPearls, last updated August 8, 2023, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499927/ . Inguinal: "Approximately 20 million inguinal hernia repairs are performed worldwide each year, with 800,000 commencing in the United States." Hope WW, Marietta M, Pfeifer C, "Minimally Invasive Inguinal Hernia Repair," StatPearls, last updated May 7, 2026, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430826/ . Corrected 2026-08-17: this page put the figures at 611,000 ventral and one million inguinal, attributed both to the ventral chapter alone, and summed them to "more than 1.6 million hernia repairs a year" in How competitive is it? and repeated the pair in Fun facts. That chapter gives 350,000 for ventral, 74% below the figure printed, and gives no inguinal volume at all. The ventral figure now matches its source and the inguinal figure has a source of its own. The field's founding argument survives intact: at roughly 1.15 million repairs a year, hernia surgery is still among the most commonly performed operations in America, which is what the 30-second version claims. ⟳ ↩ ↩²
The registry. Abdominal Core Health Quality Collaborative — founded 2013 as the Americas Hernia Society Quality Collaborative, a nonprofit collaborative collecting long-term follow-up and patient-reported outcomes for hernia and abdominal core surgery; the registry has surpassed 150,000 patients with contributions from more than 500 surgeons and more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. https://achqc.org/faqs and https://www.prweb.com/releases/abdominal-core-health-quality-collaborative-registry-surpasses-150-000-patients-302542140.html (accessed 2026). Design and rationale published as "Design and implementation of the Americas Hernia Society Quality Collaborative (AHSQC): improving value in hernia care," https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26936373/. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³

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