Emergency Medicine

Dedicated to providing world-class emergency care.

Responsibilities

Clinical

The core of the PEM fellowship at Rady Children's is clinical training. The fellow will spend most of his/her clinical time in the Sam S. and Rose Stein Emergency Care Center and will primarily see patients, along with precepting resident and medical student trainees.

The fellow will also assume increasing levels of responsibility in managing the ED appropriate to his/her experience. Specifically, the fellow will be expected to manage patient flow, participate in the care of all complicated and seriously ill patients in the ED, perform clinical procedures, manage referrals from outside facilities, and become involved in treatment of trauma patients. The fellow will be expected to function as independently as possible, but an attending PEM physician will be present in the ED and will provide the ultimate oversight for all ED patients.

Educational

The fellow is expected to become an expert in the field of pediatric emergency medicine. To this end, he/she must not only have strong clinical experiences, but an extensive knowledge of the medical literature, as well as critical appraisal skills to properly interpret this literature. Additionally, the fellow will be expected to develop the skills to present and teach materials to other health care providers, patients and families.

We encourage our fellows to ask questions regarding the medical problems they are treating, but we also expect our trainees to be assertive and aggressive in their education and to teach us as we help them develop their own skills. The fellow is expected to be self-motivated and dedicate time and energy into his/her own education, which will be supplemented by regular interactive teaching conferences. The fellows will be expected to be active participants in these educational sessions, not passive learners, and will be expected to present at many of these conferences in order to educate his/her colleagues.

Research

All fellows will be required to participate in research. Regular research meetings are held where the fellow is expected to present his/her research proposal and report on progress towards project completion. Topics in research design, statistics, epidemiology, and manuscript preparation are discussed during these meetings.

Fellows will also attend the pediatric postdoctoral Tellaus Research Conference, sponsored by the UC San Diego Department of Pediatrics and held bi-weekly at Rady Children’s. Additionally pediatric emergency medicine fellows are required to take biostatistics and epidemiology courses through UC San Diego’s Clinical Research Enhancement through a supplemental training (Crest) program.

Administration

Fellows will gain experience in pediatric emergency medicine administration through exposure to administrative issues at various levels: the emergency department, the hospital, county emergency medical services, and graduate medical education. Fellows are expected to attend monthly divisional administrative meetings and the ED continuous quality improvement committee, and they will also be expected to implement a quality improvement project.