Prestigious fellowships hit the Valley
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| Dr. Michael Peterson, chief of medicine at UCSF Fresno, oversees several prestigious new fellowship programs brought to the Valley to help alleviate the specialist shortage. |
And now, Community’s partnership with UCSF Fresno is advancing to a new level, resulting in several fellowships to train some of the most in-demand sub-specialties of health care.
UCSF Fresno was the only program nationwide to receive 2007 accreditation for a fellowship in pulmonary medicine, and one of two fellowships nationwide for cardiovascular.
“It’s a perfect synergy for what Community wants to do as developing a reputation as an academic regional medical center and for what we want to do from the education side,” said Dr. Michael Peterson, chief of medicine at UCSF Fresno.
Each sub-specialty of internal medicine will bring in three new fellows a year. The pulmonary fellowship is a two-year program, and the cardiovascular is three years with an optional fourth year.
There also is a hospitalist fellow (Andres Leon-Sanchez), a minimally invasive surgery fellow (Ahad Khan) and a surgery critical care fellow (Jason Tomlin).
“This is core to the development of an academic regional medical center,” Dr. Peterson said. “It stimulates expansion, and provides you in-house support. Physicians are either available or readily available 24 hours a day.”
Plans are in the works to develop future fellowships in gastrointestinal and infectious disease, as well as a third-year critical care component to the pulmonary fellowship.
Dr. John Ambrose, program director and chief of cardiology at UCSF Fresno, says the fellowships create a domino effect of cutting-edge training, attracting both better faculty and better residents in training.
“It creates an environment of higher learning where we openly discuss modern techniques of how to take care of patients with cardiovascular disease,” Dr. Ambrose said. “That’s really the secret.”
Ambrose oversees fellows Cyrus Buhari, Rajat Barua and Usman Javed, while Dr. Kathryn Bilello directs pulmonary fellows Anitha Channabasavaiah, Jagruti Patel and Oliver Romero.
The Valley has historically been more underserved than other parts of the state in specialty medicine, but the hope is that’s about to change with these new training programs.
“Pulmonary medicine is a very scarce specialty in the Fresno area,” said Dr. Bilello, citing lung diseases such as asthma and emphysema that are prevalent in the area. “We always have more referrals than we can accommodate at any one time.”
One of the biggest advantages of having the fellowship programs – and the overall residency training – is attracting more specialists to the Valley.
“The unique identification of these training programs is based on the unique shortage here,” Dr. Peterson said. “There is much more success keeping physicians when they train here than recruiting them to come here.”
Annually, about 200 residents are trained at Community facilities in internal medicine, emergency medicine, family practice, general surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry and critical surgical care.
Between 30% to 40% of the physicians trained at UCSF Fresno, which is located on the 58-acre Community Regional Medical Center campus, stay to practice medicine in the Valley when their studies are done.
“From what I have been told,” Dr. Peterson said, “if you have the full spectrum of training – all the way to fellowships – you can expect as many as 80%. The longer you can keep people here, and the more experience you can give them, the more likely they are to stay.”
This story was reported by Eddie Hughes. He can be reached at eddieh@communitymedical.org.