Hospital Medicine Fellowship Program, Orlando
Program Overview
Nemours Children’s Hospital, Florida (NCHFL) is a state-of-the-art, freestanding pediatric tertiary care facility located in Orlando’s beautiful Lake Nona Medical City. The hospital currently operates 130 inpatient beds serving an increasingly complex, diverse pediatric patient population. Our pediatric hospital medicine (PHM) fellows work alongside board-certified pediatric hospital medicine faculty in the dedicated care of hospitalized children, with 24/7 faculty coverage split amongst 11 full-time hospital medicine physicians and 2 full-time nurse practitioners.
The larger interdisciplinary team at NCHFL is comprised of child life therapists, dieticians, palliative care professionals, mental health professionals, care coordination and utilization management personnel, pharmacists, physical and occupational therapists, speech and language pathology therapists, public health liaisons, respiratory therapists, social workers, case managers and nurse navigators. The presence of this robust interprofessional team ensures maximal patient interface, critical thinking, and medical decision making for the pediatric hospital medicine fellow, while promoting progressive autonomy and enhancing interprofessional relationships.
The inpatient population at NCHFL is incredibly diverse in age, acuity, physiology, underlying medical disease and complexity of care. It is also robust, with children who live with chronic conditions and technology dependence. The average daily census on the inpatient service is 35 patients with 2 dedicated teaching teams capped at 15 patients per team.
Throughout the inpatient experience at NCHFL, fellows will work along pediatric resident physicians from the core pediatric program. Fellows will be encouraged to contribute to the residency educational experience through didactics teaching, interprofessional simulation workshops, quality improvement initiatives, feedback sessions and curricular development. While working on the inpatient service, fellows will assume a supervisory role, effectively taking on the responsibilities of a hospital medicine attending physician, with the added support and supervision of a board-certified hospitalist. Attending faculty will provide graduated autonomy while ensuring acquisition of critical knowledge and demonstration of clinical competency within a culture of evidence-based learning.
Several additional departments at NCHFL (Surgery, Radiology, Pathology, Anesthesia, Cardiovascular Services, Orthopedic Surgery and Maternal Fetal Medicine) are additionally invested in the clinical learning environment, unanimously providing educational and scholarship opportunities for our residents and fellows.
Mission and Aims
Mission
The PHM Fellowship Program’s mission is to train caring, compassionate physicians who are competent to provide the highest level of pediatric medical care for neonates, infants, children and adolescents; advocate for children and their families in terms of social, emotional and medical needs; address the social determinants of health for children; and have the requisite skills and scientific background to pursue careers in academic-driven pediatric hospital medicine.
Aims
To achieve our mission, the program aims to:
- Recruit highly qualified pediatricians to an academic pediatric fellowship program that embraces diversity, inclusion and equity as its core values.
- Foster critical thinking based on medical and scientific data, and provide the educational tools required for the fellows to acquire knowledge for expertise in their subspecialty field.
- Provide a curriculum of fundamental information concerning pediatric hospital medicine, which allows the fellow to develop deep medical knowledge, patient care skills and expertise in pediatric hospital medicine.
- Supervise, monitor and facilitate the educational process to assure fellows are well prepared to achieve their professional goals, including but not limited to, proficient subspecialty clinical practice, educational leadership opportunities, and contribution to meaningful scholarship at the completion of their fellowship training.
- Provide robust education regarding the social determinants of children's health to ensure that fellows recognize the broad influence of social and economic disparities on health and health care policy in their daily clinical practice, educational opportunities and scholarship portfolios.
- Recruit high-caliber pediatric academic faculty physicians who have the knowledge and expertise to provide a robust clinical learning environment with their programmatic niches and scholarship portfolios.
- Curriculum
- Salary & Benefits
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Our Fellowship Program
The 2-year program is designed to meet ACGME training requirements in pediatric hospital medicine, while allowing fellows to adapt specific training based on career goals.
Clinical inpatient pediatrics training includes:
- Clinical and teaching rounds on general inpatient teams at a freestanding tertiary children’s hospital
- Clinical and teaching rounds at a community hospital (Lakeland Regional Medical Center)
- Well newborn nursery
- Pediatric critical care
- Surgical co-management of children with medical complexity
- Resident and medical student teaching
- Administrative experience
- Development of a CV and Educational and/or Advocacy portfolios
Additional clinical elective experiences are available depending on interest, including:
- Allergy/Immunology
- Anesthesia/Pain Management
- Cardiac ICU
- Cardiology
- Child Advocacy/Child Abuse
- Endocrinology
- Gastroenterology
- Hematology/Oncology
- Infectious Disease
- Medical Education
- Neonatal ICU
- Nephrology
- Neurology
- Pediatric Emergency Medicine
- Pediatric Radiology
- Pulmonology
- Rehabilitation/Therapy Services
- Rheumatology
- Sedation
- Transport Medicine
