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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware.

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, Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware, 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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware. 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 residency program recognizes the value of learning pediatrics in unique environments. This includes practicing and learning among professionals in varied settings both nationally and internationally. Our residents have had the opportunity to experience how pediatrics is practiced in countries such as Haiti, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Egypt, India, Australia, England, The Gambia, Honduras and many others.

We have a Global Health Outreach track available to interested residents. This track allows for dedicated Global Health academic and clinical time and the opportunity to travel abroad to apply what residents learn in the track. Residents will take part in clinical care in a number of different settings within the Nemours community (i.e. Adoption Clinic, Refugee Clinic, HIV Clinic, etc) and are expected to produce a Global Health academic product by the end of residency training. The Global Health residency track provides mentorship for participants and various opportunities to present clinical and academic work.

Every year, a group of trainees and faculty travel to a developing country to further the clinical and educational work being done in that location. Prior work has been focused on General Pediatric clinical care and the Helping Babies Survive program. We work to establish meaningful partnerships with healthcare systems to provide a lasting relationship for continued support once we return home.

Many residents will participate in an international experience and as part of their general outpatient rotations, residents will work in the Nemours Pediatric Refugee Clinic located on the Sidney Kimmel Medical College campus. There they will become the medical home for various populations seeking a new life in the United States.

The residency program schedule affords time 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.
 

The inpatient curriculum at Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware 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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware.

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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware, 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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware. 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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware, 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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware 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 Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware 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.