Let me break this down for you!
Number of Residents a year: Two
Number of Full-Time Faculty: Five
1) Braun: dean of dental school, chiefs usually operates with him, 3rds and total joints
2) Ochs: Chairman, chiefs usually operates with him, 75% of his cases are orthognathics, 15% implants, and 10% 3rds
3) Costello: Program Director, craniofacial fellow and a junior chief usually operates with him, mainly operates on children
4) Chung: Director of one of the hospital's dental clinic, a junior chief always operates with him, 3rds and lots of TMJ cases
5) Sosovicka: director of pre-doc OMFS clinic at the dental school, interns usually works with him on 3rds
Number of Hospital covered: Eight
Presbyterian: main teaching hospital, resident will take facial trauma calls and round here
Children's: main teaching hospital, resident will take facial trauma calls and round here
Montefiore: main teaching hospital, resident will take facial trauma calls and round here
Mercy: adjunct hospital where adjunct faculty operates, residents will round here
VA: adjunct hospital, where adjunct faculty operates, interns will rotate here, interns will have calls from here
Jefferson: adjunct hospital where adjunct faculty operates, no calls
Shadyside: adjunct hospital where adjunct faculty operates, residents will round here
McGee: Women's hospital where residents will take consult calls from
Positives:
Resident Work Schedule: This program is very family friendly. If you're not on call for the night, you will be home by 6 or 7 PM that's including traffic getting home.
Trauma Post-call time off: At noon on the day after your trauma call night, you get to go home for the day.
Trauma Calls: Pitt OMFS team is only on facial trauma call on every 3rd week (splitting between ENT and Plastics). So if you're an intern or a first year resident, you'll only be on facial trauma call 2-3 times a month that will require you to stay in-house! Since this program do take "tooth" calls during the weeks that are non-facial trauma calls, an intern or a first-year resident will only have maybe 10 call night total in a month where 3 of which are facial trauma calls.
Paid in Medical School years: Residentswill receive a full annual resident stipend during years medical school. The down side, as medical students, you'll be taking one facial trauma call night during the facial trauma week when the OMFS team is on.
Orthognathics: Chairman trained in North Carolina under Tucker, very strong in orthognathics here. Interns will be exposed to orthognathic here early doing consultations, model surgery, seeing cases.
No MMF/IMF on call nights: Forget about putting them MMFs or IMFs on during the middle of the night when you get a mandible fracture! This program does not believe in it. ALL MMF/IMF are placed in the OR.
If you like sewing: A TON of lacs, you'll become very proficient in closing lacs between the 3 main teaching hospitals. A ton of dog bites at Children's.
Medical School: Great top medical school per US News rankings.
Negatives:
Morning rounds: Whomever was on call, you'll round by yourself on all the inpatients before each morning team meeting that will be in a conference room, you'll present all in-patients, consults, and trauma calls from the 3 main teaching hospitals in that meeting. For example, if you have 6 in-house patients and 6 ER consults, then you'll be presenting 12 patients in the morning team meeting. Yes, all by yourself! Then the team divides up to see various inpatients and/or ER consulted patients.
Selection of cases: the scope of training you get here in this program is COMPLETELY dictated by what the faculty member likes to operate on. All patients are faculty patients. For example, if faculty members wants to do orthognathics, you can't say, may I do a cosmetic case? Basically, all chief residents do 1/2 of the case, no freedom to other surgeries. Training solely based on what cases faculty has, Chiefs will have no freedom to choose what (s)he wants to be trained in.
Lack in broad scope:
Cosmetics: there is an adjunct faculty here that is facial comestically trained, but residents rarely does any plastics with him. You'll see random rhinoplasty from time to time in an orthognathic case, but if you want comestics, then this is NOT the program for you.
Implants: I would say it's OK, I've seen chiefs have done them, but it's like placing one here this week and one there next month. Mainly just Dr. Ochs that does them.
Oncology: all goes to ENT
Dr. Chung: completely a douche bag. Arrogant, malignant, condensenting, tries to be cool with residents, and lacks professionalism in ORs. Every dental student at Pitts is aware of this Wangchung.
Hospitals are EVERYWHERE: since this program covers eight hospitals, you as residents WILL walk freaking everywhere, outside, tunnels, skyways, and you'll have to walk FAST! Most programs you'll stay in this huge medical complex in one central location, this is not the program for you if you don't like walking 50 miles in a day! If any of you had interviewed here, then you'll understand what I'm talking about. For interviews themselves, the program takes you everywhere around town just to meet individual interviewers because they wanted to conduct the interviews in their respective offices!! Ridiculous!
Craniofacial Fellowship: yes, there are only 2 or 3 OMFS craniofacial fellowships out there, but this one is a joke! The fellow pretty much act as a "super chief" and holds sticks for Costello and gets yelled at the entire time! From what I've seen and heard, the fellow maybe does 5 actuall craniofacial cases or so in ONE YEARif they're lucky!! Plastics are very strong here so they get majority of the cases. Don't expect to actually do much if you're in this fellowship, but they'll expect you to be around all the time?!
Publication: it is required that you publish as a resident here, not recommended, but required.
Medical school: 3 years
Conclusion: If you want to be in Pittsburgh, then this OMFS program is the better of the two between Allegheny OMFS. It's truly not that all cracked up to be! Faculty members are not that great, training scope is limited to what faculty operates, and hospitals are everywhere spread around the city. Scale 1 to 10, 10 being LSU or Parkland, this program is a 5.