In your third year, you will gain experience caring for children with a wide variety of neurological conditions, begin exploring diverse subspecialties through outpatient specialty clinics and grow as a supervisor.
You will further refine your clinical and diagnostic skills this year, assuming increased responsibility for comprehensive patient care as well as supervision of residents and medical students. You will develop your ability to independently assess and manage complex clinical cases. You also will achieve documented competency in lumbar puncture procedures.
As a senior resident, you will gain key managerial experience in hospital wards during your continuing adult neurology rotation. You will oversee care for all patients admitted to the neurology service or assessed through neurological consultations.
Through your focused child neurology experience, you will care for pediatric patients in both hospital wards and outpatient clinics. Your training takes place at the nationally recognized Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo, and you may be assigned at times to the long-term epilepsy monitoring unit.
You also will build expertise in various neurological subspecialties training in our diverse specialty clinics with nationally and internationally recognized experts.
In addition, you will gain exposure to the multidisciplinary field of rehabilitation medicine, observing and learning from a cadre of medical professionals. You will continue to follow your own panel of patients at your assigned continuity clinic.
As in previous years of your training, you will chart your progress by taking the annual Resident In-Service Training Examination.
| Rotation | Length of Rotation |
|---|---|
| Adult Neurology | 6 modules |
| Child Neurology | 2.5 modules |
| Neurology Specialty Clinics | 2 modules |
| Rehabilitation Medicine | .5 module |
| Elective | 1 module |
| Night Float | 1 module |
1 module = 4 weeks
During each module, you will enhance your knowledge of a particular area of neurology or basic neuroscience by participating in our diverse lecture training.
Topics include: neuropathology, clinical neurophysiology (including applications to nerve conduction studies and needle electromyography), neuropsychology, neural development, neurochemistry, neuropharmacology, molecular biology, genetics, immunology, epidemiology, neuroanatomy (cranial nerves, cerebellum, brainstem circuits), EEG, neuroimaging, psychiatry, physiology of vision, language and aphasia, auditory system, cancer of the nervous system, treatment of movement disorders, statistics, ethics, and MRI/CT physics (during EMG/EEG rotations).
An annual lecture series focuses on quality improvement issues.
If you haven’t already, you will choose a research mentor early in your third year to guide you in completing your original project.
You will either begin working on a research project this year or continue an in-depth project begun in your second year.
Our residents have suggested procedural and care changes that we have successfully integrated into our practices.
For example, residents initiated our grand rounds signout and transfer sessions to ensure quality communication during care transitions. A chief resident initiated and standardized a citywide protocol for providing hypothermia treatment to post-cardiac arrest patients.
You will begin developing an original quality improvement initiative based on your ideas for improving patient care.
Toward the end of this year, you will be supervising medical students, preliminary year residents and junior residents under the guidance of attending physicians.
You will teach formally as well as informally through conferences, rounds, presentations and impromptu lectures on common neurological problems, such as stroke, seizure disorders or headaches.
You will help formally train junior residents in neurological emergencies.
You also will share your growing neurological expertise with other health care professionals as well as medical trainees in other disciplines, such as psychiatry.