curriculum and rotations
Curriculum
Two gastroenterology fellows in each of the three years receive an abundance of practical clinical experience and develop complete gastrointestinal consultative and endoscopic skills within the framework of our highly clinical fellowship. Fellows learn about the indications and contraindications for various gastrointestinal procedures, become familiar with the basic literature of our subspecialty and gain skills in management of a wide variety of individual patient cases.
Trainees in our program are provided clinical experience in both private and public hospital settings. These experiences include interaction with patients as hospital inpatients and ambulatory visits as well as during endoscopic procedural evaluation. At our primary training site, University Medical Center, patients are assigned to a specific trainee for maintence of continuity of care in clinic as well as for hospital or endoscopy encounters. As part of training, fellows participate in clinical research and are expected to actively contribute to local, regional and national meetings. Each trainee develops a detailed understanding of a comprehensive list of topics within the field of digestive disease as they conduct presentations at weekly conferences. They also present interesting and complex cases twice each month.
Didactics
Development of a comprehensive knowledge base is the primary goal of the didactic lecture series. This series serves to educate both faculty and fellows in subjects related to digestive disease as well as interdisciplinary topics such as critical assessment of medical literature, medical genetics, quality improvement, patient safety and billing/coding. Our primary lecture series consists of core lectures, case conference, IBD conference and hepatobiliary conference. Lectures are presented by faculty, fellows and invited lectures. In addition to the didactic lecture series, fellows will be assigned monthly online video lectures from ACG Universe or DDW on Demand which cover topics influenced by an individual’s PGY year and any stated career interests.
Rotations
Gastroenterology fellows are assigned to individual monthly rotations which vary in educational content. These include inpatient consult rotations, dedicated outpatient endoscopy experiences and ambulatory care experiences in IBD, Bariatrics, Hepatology and Therapeutic Endoscopy. Rotation schedules are modified for 3rd year fellows as necessary to achieve their individual training goals in preparation for clinical practice.
Fellows are assigned to call duties at University Medical Center and Ochsner Medical Center Kenner along with a faculty member. As our program maintains call agreements with partnering groups, the weeknight and weekend call is relatively infrequent, occurring every 12th weeknight and every 12th weekend.