Message from the Program Director

We have a set didactic curriculum, and although we’ll require you to perform a minimum number of cases in areas of core competency in hand surgery, you will have ample opportunities to pursue your interests.

Our rotations are designed to maximize your exposure to the more than 4,000 upper extremity cases we treat each year. Our faculty members have expertise in various subspecialties in upper extremity surgery. Therefore, our rotations are designed to provide you with balanced exposure to these various subspecialties while also considering your individual desires. We adjust the rotation schedule to address each fellow’s needs. For instance, if you’re interested in shoulder and elbow arthroscopy, we’ll ensure that you spend more time training with a faculty member who specializes in that area.

Research is important in our program, and we hold meetings to support you on your research project. We even fund our fellows for national conferences such as the annual meeting of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.

Outpatient ambulatory surgery is a primary component of our fellowship. Our fellows operate at multiple state-of-the-art ambulatory surgery centers. We expose you to a variety of upper extremity surgery procedures, including common and complex reconstructive procedures.

We carefully plan our conferences to ensure you receive comprehensive didactic instruction in addition to your clinical training. You can expect to attend citywide grand rounds, journal club, and indications meetings, and meetings with a committee for quality improvement.

We’ll also provide you with extensive microsurgical training. Here at the Jacobs School, we have a state-of-the-art, specialized microsurgical lab — partially funded by a $5.2 million grant — where you can perfect your microsurgical technique. 

Leadership opportunities are built into our curriculum. Our fellowship enables you to develop the skills you need to lead and educate others; you can expect to participate in and help supervise resident activities and training.

We’ve designed our program to let you rotate through training sites including a Level I trauma center, a children’s hospital and a federal medical center.

You’ll benefit from the large number of clinical training sites we offer by learning to work effectively in dissimilar health care delivery settings and systems. In our program, we impress on you the importance of understanding how to coordinate care in various health care systems and adjust to meet requirements and protocols for these locations. 

We understand: A healthy work-life balance is critical to your well-being.

In our program, you don’t have to compromise your personal life to be successful. That’s why we fully support family leave for any fellow welcoming a new family member through birth, fostering or adoption.

We also support medical leave if you need to care for a family member with a qualifying serious health condition.

Our flexible family leave policy will help you reduce stress and increase your autonomy in making decisions affecting you and your loved ones.

You can rest assured that we support you every step of the way. Our fellows work with attending orthopaedic surgeons primarily in a one-on-one ratio. Our graduates have reported that we provided them with an ideal amount of supervision while granting them the independence they needed.

We have a strong belief in making this the best fellowship for you. 

Best regards,

Robert H. Ablove, MD
Program Director