Fall 2024: UF Gainesville
Greetings from the swamp, home to UF-Health Shands Hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL! We’re thrilled to be celebrating our 18th year of our Emergency Medicine residency program at an ultra-large, academic, tertiary care medical center, complete with Level 1 Adult Trauma and Level 1 Pediatric Trauma services, the receiving hospital for 13 surrounding counties and home to one of the highest acuity patient presentations in the country!
Over the past year, a lot of great changes have been happening, all for the better! First, we celebrated the graduation of our Class of 2024! All 14 residents successfully graduated and received the positions, locations, and fellowships they desired. Locations included from Seattle, Washington to Plano, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia to right here in Florida! Fellowships included Interventional Pain Medicine to Ultrasound to Hyperbaric Medicine! Though many have started new adventures in far-away lands, several have chosen to stay, including our former chief, who has begun his Critical Care Medicine fellowship at UF-Health and is now one of our attendings!
In addition, we have welcomed a new class of 14 rockstar interns to join our Gator Family! These 14 interns were selected through a deeply holistic and data-oriented review process, and come from an extremely diverse set of training, experiential, and cultural backgrounds, and coming from as far away as Colorado, Pennsylvania, and the Midwest. Our program director, Dr. Lars Beattie, always espouses “bring heart to the bedside,” and oh boy, do these interns have heart! They’ve been rocking and rolling through the ED and on their off-service rotations, under the guidance of resident and faculty mentors, treating some of the most complex patients imaginable, and logging hundreds of procedures in the process, all in just their first few months! Their first month, known as the orientation month, included SIMs, procedure labs, PGY-1 tailored lectures, ACLS, ATLS, and PALS certification, and awesome social events, all of which have prepared them for the journey for the next 3 years! We’re excited to see them grow and become leaders in the field!
Our day-to-day operations continue to be exciting and evolving! Under the leadership and extraordinary hard work of Dr. Brandon Allen, we’re thrilled to announce the opening of our new Clinical Decision Unit, with 6 pathways (and more in the works) for automatic admission for 23-hour observation. Our residents continue to log hundreds of procedures monthly, and chest tubes in the Trauma/Resuscitation bay are now split with Trauma Surgery on even/odd days, allowing us for even more chest tube procedures! Our ED Social Work team continues to be available at bedside 24/7 to provide resources to our underserved population. Our Pediatric ED, under the leadership of Dr. Carolyn Holland, continues to uphold our reputation as one of the best Pediatric Emergency Departments in the country with the hiring of several new PED attendings. And we were fortunate to have physicians and residents from Ukraine and Ghana rotate through our ED this year to learn EM tips & tricks they can use back home to improve care. It was awesome to meet them and hear their stories!
Our Conference/Didactics continues to innovate, and now includes flipped classroom, interactive simulations, asynchronous learning, and procedure labs with cadavers, one of the few places in the country to do so! Our outstanding faculty continues to deliver robust, up-to-date, evidence-based information each week, and are always available for 1:1 help/training. Our freely available board-review prep materials now include subscriptions to ECGStampede and PEER, in addition to ROSH. Our volunteering opportunities continue to grow, and now include opportunities at the UF Equal Access Clinic, a UF student-run free clinic for our underserved population, and which counts towards conference credit!
We’re extremely fortunate to be home to several ACGME-accredited EM specialty fellowships, giving us residents unparalleled exposure to a variety of different career paths that are possible with EM. For example, Dr. Krish Gill, PGY-2, works with the EMS fellowship team frequently at our Gator Football games and other events. Dr. Beth Birchfield, PGY-2, went to Ghana last month with the Global Emergency Medicine fellowship team to provide care and teach their physicians and residents how to use ultrasound. Ultrasound fellowship directors Dr. Guliano DePortu and Dr. Marcus Elegante continue to teach and emphasize ultrasound use daily. Bedside ECMO CPR is now an option for STEMI arrests thanks to Critical Care fellowship director, Dr. Torben Becker. PED fellows Dr. JC Gonzales, Dr. Joon Choi, and Dr. Erin Bruney continue to share their in-depth EM pediatric knowledge with us on every PED shift. Coming soon in the near future: an Education fellowship, a Wilderness Medicine fellowship, and a Space Medicine fellowship with a partnership with SpaceX. We couldn’t be more thrilled!
Lastly, we’d like to give a huge shout-out to our visiting students who have rotated with us in the past few months, some coming as far away as California, New York, and Washington state! It’s been amazing meeting and working with each of you, and seeing you grow in just the one month you were with us! We look forward to seeing you on the interview trail coming up! Go Gators!
References: National AAAEM Benchmark Survey, 2022
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