The University of Chicago

http://surgery.uchicago.edu/specialties/neurosurgery/

Program Overview:
We are a 7 year program that alternates between 1-2 residents. Our adult hospital, pediatric hospital and outpatient center are all connected and centralized in one location. The majority of our time is spent here. We recently acquired North Shore Hospital (previously known as Evanston-Northwestern Hospital, one of Northwestern’s three main hospitals) and will be doing 6 month rotations there starting next year.

We have strong ancillary staff: 2 nurse practitioners in the adult hospital and 4 nurse practitioners on the pediatric side that allow for minimum resident scut-work and maximum OR exposure.

Didactics: We have a dedicated conference day where we do case review, grand rounds, M & M, lectures and board review. We also have journal club that is held once a month and a cadaver dissection lab, fully equipped with an OR table, microscopes and equipment. The dissection lab is held once a week. We also use the University of Chicago academic website (known as “chalk"). Dr. Hekmat (a tireless champion of resident education and an endless resource of neurosurgical knowledge) maintains the website, which contains everything from board review practice questions, to electronic copies of journal club articles, to Dr. Hekmat’s personally summarized monthly editions of the major neurosurgery journals (so that the residents can quickly skim it over and be up-to-date).

Support: Residents are all provided loupes and funding for books.

Call: Typically q5. PGY-1 to PGY-3 takes in-house call. PGY-4 and PGY-5 helps with in-house call as needed (people on vacation, etc.). PGY-6 assists in taking chief call (home). PGY-7 is obviously chief call from home.

Through the years:
PGY-1:
5 months of neurosurgery, 1 month each of orthopedics, ENT, plastic surgery, anesthesia, neuro-oncology, 2 months of neuro-ICU.

Unlike most programs, we do not do pure general surgery - we only rotate on the surgical subspecialties that have relevance to neurosurgery. We also only take call for neurosurgery, which helps to develop neurosurgical patient management skills early on. Residents even at the PGY-1 level enjoy early operative experience (being single-scrubbed with an attending is not uncommon).

PGY-2:
6 months of adult neurosurgery, 6 months of pediatric neurosurgery

PGY-3:
7 months of neurosurgery, 1 month each of neuroradiology, neuropathology, hand service (carpel tunnels, ulnar nerve entrapment, etc.) and 2 months of elective. Elective time can be spent at doing clinical neurosurgery at associated hospitals or doing an endovascular month (basically learning to do cerebral angiograms, etc.)

Time on neurosurgery is spent learning how to operate more independently.

PGY-4:
Research with 6 months of neurosurgery spent at the newly acquired North Shore Hospital.

PGY-5:
Research.

PGY-6:
12 months spent as senior resident on the adult neurosurgery service with a focus on spinal procedures.

PGY-7:
12 months as chief of neurosurgery.