The Anesthesiology Residency Program at the University of Florida-College of Medicine is fully accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The teaching resources of this program are extensive and include two fully functional anesthesia teaching simulators. Our internationally renowned faculty teaches our residents at multiple sites including Shands Hospital at the University of Florida, the Gainesville Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Florida Surgical Center, and University Florida and Shands Jacksonville.

Shands Hospital, the major teaching hospital at the University of Florida Health Sciences Center, is a 600-bed referral center with a Children's Hospital "built-in".  All specialties and subspecialties of medicine and surgery are represented at Shands Hospital.  Our newly accredited Level 1 Trauma Center provides excellent experience with the severely traumatized adult and pediatric patients.  Shands currently has twenty-three modern, fully equipped operating rooms as well as anesthesia locations in Radiology, Cystoscopy Suite, Burn Unit, Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, the Psychiatry Unit, and other locations.  Residents learn anesthesiology skills applicable to all types of patients in the operating rooms, adult and pediatric intensive care units, obstetric suite, perioperative pain management service, and many other related areas.  In addition to traditional teaching in the general operating room, all residents have scheduled blocks of subspecialty clinical rotations taught by faculty specializing in the following areas:  pediatric, obstetric, neurosurgical, cardiothoracic and outpatient anesthesia; pain management; recovery room; and adult and pediatric critical care medicine.  A one-month rotation in regional anesthesia is provided to all residents in the CA-2 year and electively in the CA-3 year.  Residents on this rotation perform as many as 10 blocks in a single day including such blocks as thoracic, lumbar, and cervical epidurals, lumbar plexus blocks, all types of brachial plexus blocks, femoral, sciatic, and popliteal blocks, and many others (both via single injections and with catheter placement).  In addition, the Gainesville Anesthesia Simulator (see below) is used in the educational program for all.

Resident rotations at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, located directly across the street from Shands Hospital, are an integral part of the general teaching program.  The patients tend to be older, and often have chronic, as well as acute, multi-organ disease.  Case selection is varied and challenging.  Most surgical subspecialties are represented, including general surgery, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, orthopedics, cardiothoracic, urology, vascular, plastic and reconstructive, and neurosurgery.  Residents gain additional expertise in regional anesthetic techniques because of the nature of the surgical procedures.  Specific rotations are provided for the general operating room, cardiothoracic anesthesia, and pain management.  Because of the nature of hospital practice and procedures, this rotation is particularly amenable to resident participation in clinical research projects.

Florida Surgical Center is a freestanding facility with four operating rooms located a few blocks from the University of Florida.  Here, residents gain experience with pediatric and adult patients who are evaluated as outpatients and expected to return home on the day of surgery.  Here also, residents gain exposure to a private practice like setting and learn many skills that will be helpful in that environment.  Finally, there is a specific rotation in regional anesthesia available at this site as well.

Our residents may also spend time in elective rotations at Shands, Jacksonville campus, which is part of the University of Florida College of Medicine educational system.  This hospital is a busy urban community hospital that serves as the major trauma center for Duval County. In this institution, our residents gain experience in the care of trauma victims.  Additional experience in other subspecialties of anesthesiology is available including cardiothoracic anesthesia, obstetric anesthesia, and pain management.  Resident rotations at University Medical Center are primarily in the CA3 year.  Living quarters are provided at no cost to the resident.  Additional elective experience in cardiothoracic anesthesia is available through our affiliation with St. Vincent's Medical Center, Jacksonville, Florida and Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Texas.

Our residents can study or prepare for seminars and conferences in the electronic anesthesiology library, located in the preoperative evaluation clinic.  In this clinic, there are seven high-end computer workstations which provide access to many different types of medical information including on-line texts, MEDLINE, on-line journals, medical consultations, on-line preoperative information and the on-line medical record system at Shands.  If further reference materials are needed, the University of Florida College of Medicine library is located next to Shands Hospital and is available to our residents.  Our departmental computer system interfaces directly with the library computer system.  Our internet connection through the University of Florida is a 10 Mbps connection providing 24-hour a day accesses to all internet resources.

Our didactic program is extensive and enhanced by the fact that our operating room schedule begins at 8:00 a.m. daily. We conduct all basic and clinical science seminars, research seminars, clinical correlation conferences, and case discussion conferences daily at 7:00 a.m., when all residents are usually free to attend (see sample conference schedule in Appendix). This solves the problem existing in some teaching centers of how to free residents from the operating room for afternoon teaching conferences. During the first two months of each academic year, all incoming residents benefit from a special introductory lecture series (see sample conference schedule in Appendices 2 and 3). These lectures cover all important basic areas and will ease the transition from medical school or internship to safe anesthesia practice. The lectures during the remaining ten months are part of a three-year core curriculum that is updated annually based on developments in the field and on our residents' performance on standardized examinations. In addition to our highly qualified, full-time teaching staff, the department's Visiting Professor Program brings experts from other areas of the world to Gainesville to participate in our didactic teaching program. We continually strive to improve and update our teaching program.
 

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CLINICAL CASE LOAD

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