The Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine supports an ACGME-accredited fellowship program under the direction of Kathryn Pade, M.D.
The PEM fellowship started in 1995 and accepts graduates from both pediatric and emergency medicine residency programs. The bulk of PEM fellows’ clinical care time is spent at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego Emergency Department, one of the busiest pediatric emergency departments in the United States and the only pediatric ED servicing the eighth most populous city in the country. Rady Children’s annual ED census is approximately 96,000 visits per year with all levels of acuity. The main ED is staffed entirely by fellowship-trained pediatric emergency physicians. As Rady Children’s is the only dedicated pediatric hospital for a wide catchment area, the ED sees a wide variety of pathology and patients across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. There is also a full complement of pediatric subspecialists.
Our Level I Pediatric Trauma Center is the only designated pediatric trauma center for San Diego County, and all trauma activation patients are seen in the ED by a team consisting of emergency physicians, trauma surgeons and intensivists. The ED has state-of-the-art equipment, including noninvasive ventilation capabilities, two video laryngoscopes and a fiberoptic bronchoscope. There are five dedicated ultrasound machines for emergency department use, and we have four fellowship-trained pediatric emergency ultrasound faculty members.
Rady Children’s is the primary pediatric teaching institution for UC San Diego School of Medicine, and the ED is the pediatric emergency medicine training site for the UC San Diego emergency medicine and pediatrics residency programs. Medical students and pediatric, emergency medicine and family medicine residents from several different training programs rotate through the Rady Children’s ED. Pediatric emergency medicine fellows supervise these trainees in a graduated fashion.
Additionally, the fellowship takes advantage of the other major training programs in San Diego. Our closest partnership is with the Department of Emergency Medicine at UC San Diego, one of the nation’s premier emergency medicine training programs. The Department of Emergency Medicine has a four-year residency program with a total of 40 residents and also has fellowships in toxicology, hyperbaric medicine, ultrasound, research, bioethics, wilderness medicine, clinical informatics, critical care, teaching and EMS/disaster medicine.
We have a two-year training program for emergency medicine residency graduates and a three-year program for pediatric residency graduates. We have been fortunate to attract fellows from both types of residency training, and our faculty includes pediatric emergency physicians with backgrounds in both pediatrics and emergency medicine.
We appreciate your interest in the PEM fellowship at Rady Children’s and UC San Diego. We participate in ERAS and only accept applications via this route. We wish you the best of luck in this process.
