residencies with peds cardio in mind

[zedpol]

Anyone have thoughts on residencies to consider if I'm leaning fairly solidly toward cardiology? Current thoughts are rochester, mayo, brown, chapel hill, yale, OHSU, cincinnati, cleveland, UW, WU, and johns hopkins, children's hospital of oakland, and denver childrens. I'm going to school in philly so i'll probably apply to CHOP but i'm not so excited about that program for residency. I'm also not a huge fan of large cities and i would prefer a program that isn't gigantic. I am interested to see what you all think.

Z

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[possum25]

If you're interested in cardiology, think about going to a program that has an active pediatric cardiac surgery program. Like it or not, the practice of pediatric cardiology is driven by surgery and to get the best exposure you probably need to be at a program that has a moderate number of cases (this "number" is questionable, but any program that does more than 200 cases/yr would be considered moderate). The biggest programs (Boston, CHOP, Michigan) all do nearly 1000 cases/year.

I went to a smaller residency program with a small but active surgery program and matched at one of the large East Coast programs for fellowship. Do not quote me exactly on this, but amongst your list of programs, the ones I definitely know have surgery include Rochester, Mayo, Yale, OHSU, Cincinnati, Wash U, U Washington, Hopkins, and Denver. I do not know about Oakland. I believe Yale, Mayo, and Denver are fairly high-volume programs. Questionable programs in my mind (only in terms of whether surgical programs exist) would be Brown and Chapel Hill.

I wouldn't worry too much about the issue, though. Go where you feel you will succeed, get good overall training, and enjoy where you live. If you do well, you can match pretty much wherever even if your residency program doesn't do much cardiac surgery.

 

[dsherida]

Another program to think about would be Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee...They do over 750 operations a year and have a very busy cath lab.

 

[arydolphin]

I'm finishing up my intern year at the Medical University of South Carolina, and I think that our program fits what you're looking for. We're definitely a medium-sized program, 12 Peds residents and 2 Med-Peds residents per year. The important thing is that we're the only hospital in the state that does pediatric CT surgery, so we have a large area to draw from for cardiology patients. Also, the cardiology fellowship here takes 3 fellows per year and just opened up a great new 12-bed pediatric cardiac ICU. The fellows stay pretty busy with the CT surgery load, there is 1 CT surgeon who only operates on kids and another CT surgeon who does about 10% kids and 90% adults, so the operations don't stop when the main guy goes out of town. There also a 10-bed cardiology unit on the regular floors where all interns do a month mainly taking care of postop patients. You can also do electives during your 2nd and 3rd years in the cardiology clinic or in the PCICU (I'll be in there in November, it should help me out going into interviews for a cardiology fellowship). Finally, Charleston is not a big city by any means, but it's an awesome place to spend a few years (I also went to med school here), there are very few places where you can leave the hospital post-call and be sitting on the beach in 20 minutes. I know that our program isn't on the same level prestige-wise as some of the programs you mentioned in your original post, but I would encourage you to look into our program in your search. If you have other questions, just PM me.