In this rotation, you’ll get training in the full range of adolescent general medical and surgical issues, including birth control, prenatal care and counseling, drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and adolescent mental health. You’ll see teenagers and young adults in community-based clinics, as well as high school and college health centers. You’ll also get exposure to the adolescent eating disorders and weight management programs at duPont Hospital for Children.

Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and the Ambulatory Pediatrics Unit at Wilmington Hospital (part of the Christiana Care Health System) are the educational centers for General Ambulatory Pediatrics. Between the two facilities, approximately 30,000 patients of all ages are seen annually for well-child care, acute illness, emergencies, and chronic conditions.

A large group of full-time pediatric faculty in the Division of General Pediatrics supervises resident education and clinical care. During all sessions, faculty members are available to counsel and advise residents and medical students. Following a daily conference or journal club, you’ll care for approximately four to six patients in each afternoon session. To develop teaching skills, as a senior resident you’ll function as a clinical preceptor for the medical students and junior residents.

Continuity clinics will give you longitudinal experience with your own panel of patients and take place at multiple sites, including Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Wilmington Hospital, duPont Hospital for Children, and several of the Nemours primary care clinics. Because patients are primarily from lower socioeconomic groups, you’ll learn to manage problems typically associated with them. You’ll also assign patients cared for on inpatient, NICU, well-baby nursery, and ambulatory block rotations to continuity clinics.

In addition, you’ll spend week-long sessions in the offices of community-based pediatricians. This will give you the chance to care for suburban, urban, and rural patients in an office setting that’s a more realistic preparation for private practice than the traditional hospital clinic. Community pediatricians serve as excellent role models who can demonstrate how various legal, social, financial, and governmental factors affect a private office practitioner.

During this rotation, you’ll work closely with developmental pediatricians, psychologists, and psychiatrists at duPont Hospital for Children. You’ll learn to differentiate between normal and abnormal behavior, administer and interpret basic developmental screening tests, identify learning problems and developmental delays, provide anticipatory guidance for families with common concerns related to development, and manage certain psychological problems and child abuse.

You’ll also be exposed to problems such as cerebral palsy, autism, learning, attention, and conduct disorders. Visits to preschool, elementary, and special-needs schools in the surrounding community will ground you in school readiness and community education resources.

The inpatient curriculum at duPont Hospital for Children and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital is designed to give you broad-based experience in managing children of all ages with conditions that require hospital care. This experience combines exposure to general pediatric and subspecialty problems — the common as well as the rare — at duPont Hospital for Children.

You’ll gain experience with full-service inpatient programs in pediatric oncology, pediatric cardiology, sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, renal dialysis and transplantation, infectious diseases, neuromuscular disorders, gastroenterology, rheumatology, asthma, diabetes, liver transplantation, and congenital heart disease, among others.

On daily rounds, you’ll learn from a team approach to family-centered patient care and interact directly with attending physicians. These dedicated pediatricians will assist you as teachers, advisors, mentors, and advocates, helping to foster interaction between you, other faculty members, and ancillary staff.

Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and the nearby Christiana Hospital are both regional high-risk perinatal centers, with large active neonatal intensive care units. Combined, there are 1,300 admissions annually. These state-of-the-art facilities, along with a recently developed surgical NICU at duPont Hospital for Children, share a fully accredited neonatology fellowship training program.

Ongoing research projects focus on ECMO, liquid ventilation, respiratory physiology, neonatal infectious disease, SIDS, fluid and electrolyte abnormalities, lipid metabolism, and the long-term effects of prematurity on neurologic development.

In addition to your work in the NICU, you’ll gain experience in the delivery rooms and with neonatal transport. Board-certified neonatologists and fellows carefully supervise our residents and make teaching rounds on a daily basis. You’ll be certified in the Neonatal Resuscitation Program at the beginning of your training.

The PICU rotation takes place in the 22-bed unit at the duPont Hospital for Children. PICU experience will expose you to a full range of acute medical and surgical problems, and will help you become skilled in important technical procedures, including life-support monitoring, respiratory therapy, and parenteral nutrition. You’ll gain practical experience with evidence-based medicine and access didactic sessions that include mechanical ventilator management, pharmacology of sedatives, analgesia, inotropes, vasopressors, and approach to the pediatric airway, etc.

You’ll participate in mock codes and learn to counsel parents of critically ill children. You’ll also become certified in Pediatric
Advanced Life Support (PALS) at the beginning of your residency training. In addition, you can elect to participate in transports of critically ill children.

Emergency Medicine rotations are done at duPont Hospital for Children, which has a Level II Trauma Center (and the only pediatric trauma center in the state of Delaware) designed exclusively for the care of pediatric patients. The emergency department logs approximately 50,000 visits annually. It’s staffed by first-, second-, and third-year pediatric residents, and is supervised 24 hours a day by full-time faculty members who are board-certified in pediatric emergency medicine.

You’ll gain experience with a broad range of acute problems and frequent mock codes. Interactive conferences are held weekly, with special training sessions in various procedures. In addition, you’ll interact frequently with surgeons and subspecialists, and you’ll have the opportunity to become involved in emergency medicine-related research projects.

Upper-year residents rotate through many of the duPont pediatric surgery clinics, with pediatric surgery and surgical subspecialty attending physicians. We’ll encourage your exposure to routine operating room cases, as well as participation in all outpatient general surgery, urology, otolaryngology, orthopedics, and ophthalmology clinics. You’ll benefit from frequent interaction with general pediatric surgeons and surgical sub-specialists in our emergency department and all inpatient rotations.

Before its major expansion in the 1980s, the duPont Hospital for Children primarily served children with orthopedic and chronic conditions. Although the scope of the Hospital has broadened widely, it still maintains its excellence in long-term rehabilitative care. Here, the rehabilitation unit cares for children and adolescents with brain and spinal cord injuries, acquired central nervous system disorders, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, prosthetic limbs, postencephalopathies, and other rehabilitation needs. You’ll be exposed to our interdisciplinary team management approach — in which physicians, nurses, and psychologists work together with speech, physical, occupational, and child life therapists.

The Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories, one of the research departments at the hospital, is at the forefront of research in rehabilitation robotics, speech synthesis, and other adaptive technologies. This allows a unique on-site interconnection between engineer, clinician, and patient.

We have a full complement of pediatric medical and surgical subspecialty faculty members with extensive teaching experience.
A full-service pediatric cardiothoracic/cardiology program at duPont Hospital for Children includes 13 cardiologists and the cardiothoracic surgery team. The hospital also has skilled pediatric transplant team.

You’ll interact with subspecialists and surgeons while assigned to inpatient services during medical/surgical specialty rotations and elective rotations. In these rotations, you can choose from a wide variety of ambulatory clinic experiences.

Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals and Christiana Care hospitals deliver more than 10,000 babies annually. You’ll work in the well-baby nurseries while on a rotation that’s separate from the NICU blocks.

Attending rounds and didactic conferences are held daily. In addition to managing routine newborn care, you’ll be given extensive experience in counseling parents about their newborns and providing anticipatory guidance. Lactation programs are available at both sites. Full-time, experienced pediatricians will supervise and teach you on this rotation, with additional support by lactation specialists.