No personal experience, and I dont know anything specific about the Johns Hopkins one but like any fellowship, you need to be very careful and clear about what you are expecting to get out of any given program. Acute care surgery is somewhat of a fancy term for "the **** that comes in in the middle of the night." Its hard to truly consider this a specific subspecialty of general surgery....it IS general surgery. So I'm sure that the ACS people have a nice verbose way of describing it, but it is essentially what we call a "transition to practice" fellowship. I.E. its for those who don't feel entirely comfortable straight out of gen surg residency, to allow them to get their feet on the ground in a more supervised and structured setting. Not to say thats a bad thing, only you can know how comfortable and ready you are, and the way work hours and the overall training environment are changing, its becoming routine for surgery grads to feel this way.
That being said, you are essentially sacrificing a few hundred thousand dollars of your salary for a year for someone to be around to tell you you made the right call on that bowel obstruction. Thats a pretty big sacrifice, but maybe in the grand scheme of things its clearly worth it to you.
JHU having an opening doesnt mean a whole lot to me since these are newer fellowships and are not very competitive at this time. On the one hand its a little depressing that they exist, but clearly they are meeting a demand that is out there, so what are you gonna do
