Curriculum

In your fellowship training over three years, you will have increasing independence and autonomy to oversee clinical care for the patients, lead family centered rounds, coordinate multidisciplinary care and supervise pediatric residents, medical students and other trainees in the NICU.

Fellows are the leaders of the resuscitation care team that attends all high risk deliveries. With a robust neonatal transport service provided by our RPC, you will learn how to manage transport calls from community physicians and direct treatment and transfer to our center.

You will also have opportunities to participate as a member of the transport team when appropriate and feasible.

In the first year, you will spend about half of the year in the NICU on the clinical service. With faculty supervision on rounds and on transport calls, you will participate in multidisciplinary care to our patients. Most of the other half of the first year is spent in identifying, designing and implementing a research project.

Goals for the first year include:

• Advancing knowledge in managing neonatal conditions
• Honing neonatal procedural skills
• Developing expertise in neonatal resuscitation and participating in high risk deliveries
• Coordinating comprehensive care plans with multidisciplinary teams often including pediatric subspecialists
• Experience with family centered care, participating in care conferences and formulating discharge goals and coordinating discharge of patients

After your first year, on-service NICU time decreases and research time increases. There are opportunities here for streamlining training, based on your interests and prior training.

In your second and third years, you will:

• Lead family centered daily rounds with increasing independence leading up to “pretending” attending rotations in your third year
• Independently direct neonatal transport calls, optimizing care plans and transfers of these neonates
• Lead neonatal resuscitation teams, especially at complicated and high risk deliveries
• Teach pediatric residents, medical students and other trainees in the NICU in both clinical care components as well as procedural skills
• Be able to train in advanced procedures such as placement of percutaneous central venous catheters (PCVL)
• Provide antenatal consults to high risk mothers presenting to Maternal Fetal Medicine clinic, under the guidance of an attending neonatologist and often in a multidisciplinary group. While on call, you will also be providing prenatal consults for patients admitted to labor and delivery with impending preterm deliveries.
• Provide consults on infants admitted to the Mother-Baby Unit, who are otherwise managed by the pediatric hospitalist team, newborn infants brought to the pediatric emergency room for hyperbilirubinemia or after out-of-hospital births.

You are expected to maintain active NRP provider status by undergoing training at the beginning of their fellowship.

As a senior fellow, you have the opportunity to participate in training other providers, with established NRP instructors in the division, and are encouraged to become an NRP instructor.

The Maternal-Fetal Medicine Center caters to mothers from the WNY region with high risk pregnancies requiring close monitoring, at risk of delivering preterm infants or with known fetal anomalies. Our fellows have 2 week rotations in MFM, once each in 2^nd and 3^rd year where they participate in care and management of high-risk pregnancies at the Maternal Fetal Medicine center under the guidance of core MFM faculty.

Senior fellows have the opportunity to avail of a two-week offsite cardiothoracic rotation at the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester, NY.

Customized elective rotations are possible in years 2 and 3, including, but not limited to, PICU/ECMO etc.

At the Robert Warner Rehabilitation Center, you will actively participate in the NICU High Risk Follow-Up Program, which provides neurodevelopmental evaluation and follow-up for all high-risk infants discharged from the NICU. This mandatory clinic rotation is spread equally over all three years.