Neonatal/Perinatal Medicine Fellowship

Our Fellowship Program

The fellowship program in Neonatal-Perinatal medicine offers the unique opportunity to provide clinical care at three distinct settings in the Delaware Valley. Your clinical experience will range from the largest delivery center in Delaware at Christiana Hospital, through a large inner-city delivery experience at Thomas Jefferson University to a referral children’s hospital NICU at Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware. The clinical program will provide training across the full breadth of neonatal care from the care of the periviable premature neonate to providing ECMO to the critically ill term newborn.

While experiencing high-level clinical training you will also be fully immersed in a vibrant academic environment, including weekly dedicated lecture time, multiple clinical conferences and a defined research and simulation curriculum. As your fellowship progresses and research becomes more prominent, you will be presented with an abundance of research opportunities ranging from bench basic science research, through clinical database design to qualitative research methodology.

Our fellowship program graduates clinically and academically excellent Neonatologists that we anticipate to become future clinical and academic leaders in the field.

Program Components

Unique Clinical Settings

You’ll do your rotations at all hospital facilities. Although the campuses are located within 45 minutes of each other, you’ll work at only one of these clinical sites on any given day:

• Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware, located in Wilmington, Del., is one of the top children’s hospitals in the United States providing high-level clinical care and cutting edge academic research. Part of your clinical experience will occur in the 14-bed Cardiac Intensive Care Unit where you will care for infants with congenital heart disease both before and after surgery. In the 32 bed referral NICU you will learn the care of the surgical infant, the infant requiring ECMO and those requiring multiple complex subspecialty referrals. As of the fall of 2019, the hospital will open and your experience will include the Advanced Delivery Program focusing on the care of the fetally diagnosed neonate requiring immediate access to post-delivery care.
• Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, the Intensive Care Nursery (ICN) at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, located in Philadelphia and affiliated with Sidney Kimmel Medical College, is a 40-bed Level III NICU associated with a busy delivery room and a maternal fetal medicine department that serves as a referral service for high-risk pregnancies. The ICN is also a tertiary referral site for neonates requiring photocoagulation therapy for retinopathy of prematurity and therapeutic hypothermia for hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. Its urban setting exposes you to a highly diverse patient population with a particular focus on premature neonates born as early as 22 weeks gestation and opiate exposed neonates with neonatal abstinence syndrome as a part of the Maternal Addiction Treatment Education & Research (MATER) program..
• Christiana Hospital, located in Newark, Del., is the only general tertiary care facility in the state and is a high risk obstetrics referral center. With more than 7,000 annual deliveries, the hospital has an active maternal fetal medicine department that evaluates high-risk pregnancies and a 68-bed Level III NICU. The NICU has an annual admission rate of 1,500 newborns and an average daily census of 49. Our training environment is enriched by the hospital’s advanced neonatal transport team which has served as a mobile NICU for more than 25 years. The hospital offers total body hypothermia to treat hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. In collaboration with the pediatric subspecialists at Nemours, the NICU provides neonatal palliative care services through the IMPACT team which is comprised of a neonatologist who is board certified in hospice and palliative medicine, physicians and nurses from neonatology and obstetrics, advanced practice clinicians, social work and pastoral care. Our neonatology group is active in quality improvement, clinical research and trainee education.

Program Activities

With fellows from other programs, you’ll participate in a variety of didactic sessions, including basic research training and statistics, as well as pediatric grand rounds.

Other activities include:

• Daily teaching rounds during clinical rotations
• Orientation lectures on ventilator management and ECMO
• Neonatal-perinatal, laboratory and radiology rounds
• Fellow physiologic lecture series (weekly lectures that cover the entire content of the subspecialty certifying examination)
• Classic and neonatal journal clubs
• Fellow board review
• Conferences and seminars on fellow research, quality
  improvement, professionalism/communication, morbidity and mortality and fetal therapy

Master's Opportunity at Thomas Jefferson University

You may also pursue a Masters degree through Thomas Jefferson University, concurrently or following your fellowship training. They offer programs in:

• Human clinical investigation (NIH-sponsored)
• Public health
• Healthcare quality and safety

These fulfill the scholarly activity requirement of the American Board of Pediatrics.