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 I 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 subspecialists 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.

The ACGME requires that pediatric residents be effective teachers and develop skills in the education of patients, families, students, residents and other health professionals.  The RAT rotation is our effort to meet these goals. Highlights of the program include: learning specific strategies and techniques to improve teaching skills, opportunities to practice in real-time with direct observation and feedback, meeting with Kids Health, giving feedback during bedside rounds, and small group sessions with medical students and sub-I’s. 

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.

Our goal is to ensure our residents are happy and healthy. In 2015, we started a resident wellness program that focuses on strengthening the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health of our residents. The wellness program includes dedicated wellness didactic lectures throughout the year, gratitude initiatives, and wellness activities including mindfulness and meditation, call-free resident events and retreats, increased access to mental health professionals, a pastoral care partnership, and ensuring each of our residents receives one extra personal day a year.

Our program recognizes the need to train not only great clinicians, but also outstanding leaders and teachers in the field of pediatrics. In the spirit of Nemours’ commitment to growing leaders and improving work performance and personal development, we have developed a curriculum that will provide our residents with the skills essential to becoming leaders in the medical system. A series of retreats, at the PL1, PL2 and PL3 level helps accomplish this goal.

The intern retreat’s theme is Self Awareness, aiming to explore unique aspects of the individual and provide basic teaching tools in the context of understanding varying personality types. This retreat lays the foundation for team building.

The second year retreat focuses on The World Around Us: Interpersonal and Group Dynamics; exploring group dynamics and how individuals work within groups. The goal is to improve teaching skills in the context of group and interpersonal dynamics by stressing feedback training.

At the final retreat, the seniors work towards Leading and Growing Beyond Residency. The focus is on exploring the aspects of successful leadership, professional and personal development, relying on past experiential training.

All retreats last two days and are held at the beach or shore. They offer an opportunity for residents to come together as a class and to form deeper relationships.

In addition to overnight retreats, several additional one-day events occur throughout the academic year. These are planned to supplement and further the leadership and educational training curriculum. Others address specific issues, including patient safety, career planning, patients with terminal care issues, and preparing for new responsibilities that come with promotion to the next level.

A yearly event, this is a residency-sponsored get-together to break the monotony of the winter. You’ll even help select the location and entertainment for this annual celebration.

You can be take part in the coordination of frequent hospital-wide Happy Hours designed to build a sense of camaraderie among nurses, respiratory therapists and faculty.

A senior resident dinner is held for graduating residents and their significant others in May. There is a festive graduation ceremony for resident’s family and friends to celebrate their accomplishments in June. This ceremony is also attended by the hospital community.

Residents and attendings celebrate a successful year at a formal dinner dance in June.

Asthma Day is a popular annual fall event hosted by the pediatric residents at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children which provides education and awareness about asthma. Events include: free flu shots, an “asthma bus”, tables about asthma triggers/smoking prevention/asthma physiology/medications/etc. A prevention rapper, “Ain’t No Puff Daddy” performs.

Pediatric residents participate in the practice and management of our Orange Street Clinic, which was established by the Jefferson pediatric residents to help the underserved children of our area. At Orange Street, residents and volunteer attendings provide a bi-weekly clinic in the Salvation Army Women and Children's shelter. Children at the clinic are seen for acute problems, receive routine immunizations, have follow up for chronic health concerns, and get referrals for ongoing health concerns. The residents also manage the clinic by organizing the staffing schedules, acquiring the medications and supplies, and arranging follow up. Overall, it has been a wonderful success for the community and our residents.

JeffHOPE is an organization run entirely by the students of Sidney Kimmel Medical College that provides health care services to the underserved throughout Philadelphia. JeffHOPE runs five weekly clinics, two at women & children's shelters, two at men's shelters, and one alongside a needle exchange site. Jefferson residents play a significant role staffing these clinics, educating students, and providing for the needs of the underserved. Many students and residents volunteer in the evenings or on weekends. JeffHOPE is one of the oldest free care clinics in the United States.
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The residency program recognizes the value of learning Pediatrics in unique environments. This includes practicing and learning among professionals in other countries. In recent years, our residents had the opportunity to experience how Pediatrics is practiced in countries such as Haiti, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Egypt, India, Australia, England, Rwanda, Honduras and many others.

We have developed this into an international health curriculum that teaches international medicine and provides a more global perspective on healthcare. We also recently started a global health track. This track is open to five residents per year and offers personalized training in global health matters both here and abroad.

Every year a group of residents spend two weeks in a rural fishing village on the North Coast of Haiti providing much needed acute and preventive care to the surrounding population. As of 2015, a new training site in Rwanda has been established for those interested in a more in-depth global health experience.

The residency program schedule affords time for you to participate in such experiences. In addition, residents are encouraged to work with the global health advisors in developing an international experience of their own.

Many residents will participate in an international experience while in our residency. As part of their outpatient rotations, residents also will work in the Nemours Pediatric Refugee Clinic located on the Jefferson Campus. There they will become the medical home for various populations seeking a new life in the United States.

To learn more, please feel free to contact the program coordinator or Dr. Christopher Raab, Medical Director for International Health.