Gain experience diagnosing and treating a wide variety of gastrointestinal disorders, develop your communication skills and professionalism and become familiar with basic endoscopic procedures during our GI consult service rotation.
During our GI consult rotation, you will be responsible for obtaining patient history, performing physical examinations and reviewing laboratory data for each consult. You can expect to develop diagnostic and therapeutic plans and write detailed initial consultation notes with the guidance of our attending physician. We’ll rely on you to write follow-up notes as appropriate.
You’ll gain teaching and leadership experience when you participate in housestaff and student teaching. You’ll assign cases to residents and students rotating on the service, but we expect you to also independently evaluate these patients.
The service will round with the attending physician daily, and present new consults and review ongoing patients. We expect you to read the relevant medical literature regarding your cases and discuss important articles on rounds.
You will develop skills in written and oral communication as you collaborate with physicians who consult the GI service and health care professionals from other departments, such as radiology, pathology and surgery.
You’ll gain experience with all basic endoscopic procedures, including:
As a first-year fellow, you will have opportunities to observe procedures including esophageal pH studies and endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatogram tests. As a second- or third-year fellow, we’ll train you to perform these procedures during our advanced procedures rotation.
You’ll have opportunities to perform endoscopies in our endoscopy unit five days per week. Our attending physicians, who are designated as the teaching endoscopists each session, will assign procedures to you.
In addition, our attending physicians will guide you as you perform emergency endoscopies in the intensive care unit, operating rooms or emergency room.
Our GI consult rotations take place in two training environments:
During rotations at the Buffalo VA Medical Center, you'll become especially experienced with:
With the support of our faculty, you will perform percutaneous liver biopsies on outpatient referrals, learn to use ultrasound to select appropriate biopsy sites and gain familiarity with equipment including biopsy needles and guns.
This rotation is particularly strong in diseases common in the veteran population, including:
Rotations at ECMC will help you become especially familiar with:
You can expect to spend half of each rotation in the endoscopy unit and half performing consults.
You will see patients who have GI diseases including: