One half-day per week (Wednesday afternoons) is dedicated to providing educational activities for the trainees. No fellows are on call Tuesday nights so that Wednesday afternoon didactics are protected. During this time, lectures based on the content outline published by the American Board of Pediatrics are delivered by both fellows and attendings.
Additional educational activities include:
- Case conferences
- Weekly neonatal radiology rounds
- Weekly rounds with maternal-fetal medicine fellows and faculty
- Monthly combined perinatal pathology conferences
- Monthly maternal-fetal and neonatal didactics conducted by the trainees
- Monthly Morbidity & Mortality conferences
- Quarterly regional conferences with other fellowships in the area, including UC San Diego and Loma Linda University.
Clinical rotations at our three training institutions are limited to a maximum of 14 months of NICU and three months of electives (MFM, cardiology and CVICU) during the three-year fellowship.
Research training is accomplished with an assigned research mentor in clinical, applied or bench research for 21 months of the three-year training. Most months fellows will take call as well, but six of the 21 months are call-free so that fellows can dedicate their time entirely to their research project.
Specialty clinics include a high-risk infant developmental follow-up clinic and a pulmonary clinic for the NICU graduates. Fellows are required to spend six half-days per month for six months attending clinics during the research month assignment. Both of these clinics are located at CHOC.
Elective rotations consist of one month of maternal-fetal medicine in your first year (two weeks at Miller Children’s Hospital and two weeks at UCI), one month of cardiology at CHOC in your second year and one month of CVICU at CHOC in your third year. Fellows have an opportunity to follow patients with complex cardiac lesions (pre-, intra- and postoperatively) as well ECMO patients.
The program provides valuable educational resources for the trainees. These include free access to the medical libraries at the training institutions as well as the science library at the university. These services include computer facilities, access to internet and intranet, and audio-visual equipment.
Trainees are given an educational stipend for book purchases and for the preparation of poster presentations and publication of manuscripts, as well as reimbursements for travel expenses to make presentations at research meetings.
Trainees get four weeks of vacation each year.