* Pulmonary Rehabilitation
* Pulmonary Diagnostics Laboratory

Surgery Residency Program


Our surgical volume is huge. We perform over 35,000 cases a year including almost 1,000 laparoscopic cholecystectomies, 200 thyroid procedures, over 2,000 cardiac surgical procedures, 400 bariatric procedures and more than 500 colon procedures. We also saw 3,300 trauma patients. These numbers give us the capability to educate residents in all aspects of surgery despite a decrease in duty hours. We have hired a cadre of nurse practitioners, physician assistants and house surgeons to maximize the use of duty hours.

Our faculty enjoys teaching. Many of our private surgeons participate in our mentoring program, which brings residents to the private setting and integrates them into an office practice. Our residents get to participate as junior parties with all the advantages of continual care in a private practice.

Our academic credentials continue to grow. As we prepare to become the Northern Campus of VCU/MCV in 2005, we will be seeing our first contingent of third and fourth-year medical students. Presently, we are training two postgraduate fellows - one in trauma/critical care and one in bariatric surgery. We also have two residents from university programs performing their research years with our trauma team. Last year, out faculty contributed to numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals as well as numerous chapters in popular textbooks. A new research method program started this year to help our residents prepare papers for national presentations. Our advanced laparoscopy lab is an excellent facility to practice new technologies with supervision of our laparoscopic faculty. We're proud that one of our teaching faculty received the resident's teaching award from Georgetown University School of Medicine for the second year in a row.

We are constantly improving. This year saw the promulgation of new regulations to improve the education experience of the residency. As a new program, we have used these as an opportunity to design a program that fits easily into the 80-hour week, the evaluation of six care competencies and the computer age. Generally, our on-call schedule is based on an every fourth night principle without resorting to night float, while our sub-specialties have excellent cross-coverage combining residents rotating in from the surrounding university program supplemented with local surgery from outside the program.