Director's Message

Welcome to the UCI/CHOC Pediatric Critical Care Fellowship program. Children’s Health of Orange County (CHOC) had previously been the primary clinical site for the Harbor-UCLA/CHOC Pediatric Critical Care Fellowship program for over two decades. In 2019, UCI and CHOC launched an affiliation as a separate Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship accredited by the ACGME. The UCI/CHOC program now has a full complement of fellows and proudly graduated its first class of pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) intensivists in June 2023.

CHOC PICU faculty and staff are heavily involved in all aspects of the trainees’ clinical and research experiences. CHOC faculty are nationally known for their teaching, clinical and research efforts.

The UCI/CHOC Children’s fellows receive a well-rounded and complete experience with core rotations in CHOC’s PICU and cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU), as well as the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles cardiothoracic intensive care unit.

In addition to the core rotation in these units, the UCI/CHOC Pediatric Critical Care Fellowship program offers fellows the following unique experiences:

• CHOC has a seasoned, successful vascular access team, skilled in the placement of peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs), peripheral IV lines and arterial lines using ultrasound. This team has experience teaching fellow physicians how to successfully use ultrasound for vascular access. The program includes a two-week rotation in the fellow physician’s first year of training.
• CHOC has an active telemedicine program and a very busy air and ground inter-facility transport program. These programs allow faculty and fellows to communicate visually and aurally with multiple hospitals in the community to help guide the care of critically ill children at their sites. Under the supervision of critical care faculty, fellows will be involved in telemedicine consultations during their ICU service months, providing guidance for managing critically ill children. The fellows will also accompany the transport team for critical care transports.
• CHOC has an active innovation institute. The Sharon Disney Lund Medical Intelligence, Information, Investigation & Innovation Institute (Mi4) at CHOC is a unique and first-of-its-kind institute that creates, focuses and executes projects in the areas of intelligence and innovation in pediatric medicine. These two interrelated disciplines, extremely limited in development in the pediatric realm, hold great promise to change the trajectory of pediatric care around the world. Mi4 aims to foster robust developments in artificial intelligence methodologies, as well as innovative advances in emerging areas such as genomic medicine, regenerative medicine, robotics, nanotechnology and medical applications/devices. Mi4 is dedicated to empowering data intelligence and medical innovation at CHOC and driving innovation leadership in the international pediatrics community. Fellow physicians in our program will be exposed to Mi4 and have the opportunity to partake in an innovation project during their training if they choose. Learn more about Mi4.
• UCI Medical Center, located five minutes from CHOC, continues to be a regional referral center for pediatric burn patients. CHOC’s critical care faculty provide critical care consultation to the burn team at UCI and procedural sedation for these patients. Fellow physicians will have the opportunity to accompany critical care faculty during their first year of training to gain experience in pediatric burn patient care and procedural sedation.
• Fellows will also have access to the UCI School of Medicine Medical Education Simulation Center, a 3,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art medical simulation center that provides telemedicine and simulation-based educational programs. The center has a full-scale operating room, an emergency room trauma bay and a critical care unit to be used for simulation. CHOC is also in the planning phase of constructing an in-situ simulation suite within the hospital. A member of CHOC’s critical care faculty will be the director of this simulation center, and the plan is to utilize the center as an added educational resource for fellow physicians.

I invite you to explore our website to learn about the educational and training opportunities our fellowship program provides. If you have any questions about the program, please feel free to contact us.

Juliette Hunt, MD
Fellowship Program Director