Buffalo VA Medical Center

The Buffalo VA Medical Center is an advantageous training site because it enables you to gain significant experience treating urologic conditions within a veteran population. 

Although you’ll treat both male and female patients of all adult ages, many of your patients will be older males. Caring for these patients will broaden your knowledge of comorbidities often occurring in older male patients and will familiarize you with the domains of obstructive diseases, urinary incontinence, oncology, infectious diseases of the urinary tract, urolithiasis and erectile dysfunction. 

At this site you’ll be responsible for initial admission histories and physical exams of all urology patients and for consultations requested by other services. 

With senior residents and our faculty attending physicians, you’ll review findings from evaluations and from laboratory, imaging and other studies, allowing you to gain proficiency and confidence in the diagnosis and management of urologic patients.

During outpatient urology clinics, with the guidance of a faculty member, you’ll gain experience initiating a urologic evaluation. You’ll also learn the importance and techniques of long-term follow up.

In your first year of training at the Buffalo VA Medical Center, we’ll make sure you’re present at all surgical procedures, including robotic procedures.

You’ll spend a total of one month rotating at the the Buffalo VA Medical Center during your first year in our program. 

As a second-year resident, you’ll continue to gain experience performing initial assessments and developing proposed plans of diagnostic and therapeutic management. 

Rounding twice daily — or more often depending on patients’ conditions — will strengthen your knowledge of all areas of patient care and enhance your interpersonal skills and professionalism. Further, you’ll see, firsthand, the importance of careful chart documentation using electronic medical records.

Rotating at the Buffalo VA Medical Center in your second year allows you to gain further experience with outpatient urology. Here, with the guidance of our faculty, you will continue to build skills in:

• initiating the urologic evaluation of patients
• communicating with other health care professionals and patients
• performing physical examinations 
• ordering and interpreting diagnostic studies

The Buffalo VA Medical Center is one of the sites where you’ll undertake training in robotic surgery. Here, we’ll teach you the basic components of the robotic platforms, acquaint you with safety issues unique to robotic surgery and enable you to safely operate the instruments from the console.

When you rotate through this training site as a chief resident, you’ll be in charge of the conduct of the entire urology service. Our faculty attending physicians will be available to provide support, but you will undertake the maximum amount of responsibility during this rotation.

You can expect to review second-year trainees’ findings on all patients and also conduct your own independent patient examinations. 

At this point of your training, you should feel adept at reviewing all laboratory and imaging studies to ensure that patient charts are appropriately documented. Additionally, you’ll feel capable of justifying your recommendations for treatment with evidence-based medicine.

Moreover, rotating at the Buffalo VA Medical Center in your final training year will help fine-tune your surgical skills. Here, our faculty will supervise as you gain experience serving as the primary surgeon on operative cases.

• PGY-1: 1 month
• PGY-2: 4 months
• PGY-5: 4 months