What to Expect
A one-week orientation program prior to beginning your PL-1 year gives you a few days to meet your peers and get acquainted with the hospital and Milwaukee. Classes in Basic Life Support, Neonatal Advanced Life Support, and Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) are given during the week and lead to certificates in each area. Pediatric Level-1 Program During your first year, your training will emphasize the diagnosis and management of general pediatric problems in both ambulatory and hospitalized patients. For six months, you will function as the primary physician for assigned patients who need primary, secondary or tertiary care on the general inpatient care units. You will be supervised by a third-year resident and staff physician, and your work will be reviewed daily during ward rounds. In turn, you will be assigned one junior medical student who also will follow your patients. You are responsible for directing that student's exposure to pediatric patients. Four months of the year are devoted to working with ambulatory patients and normal newborns, including an elective experience. Residents work in the primary care clinic and in our Emergency Department/Trauma Center (ED/TC). Both the primary care clinic and the emergency department are staffed by full-time faculty. An additional month is spent in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit and the final month of the PL-1 rotation is spent in the Hematology/Oncology/Transplant Unit. You can expect to be scheduled for in house call an average of every fourth night.
Pediatric Level-2 Program As a second year resident, you gain valuable experience in the management of critically ill children. The PL-2 spends two rotations (four weeks each) in the Children's Hospital Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, which is staffed by full-time pediatric intensivists and fellows. In addition, two rotations are spent in the neonatal intensive care unit at Children's Hospital. The PL-2 has primary responsibility for a number of the critically ill infants. Residents also begin to participate in delivery room assessment and stabilization. Your ambulatory training continues in the second year with four weeks at the primary care clinic, four weeks in the ED/TC, four weeks in adolescent medicine and four weeks of outpatient community pediatrics. An additional rotation is spent in the outpatient surgery clinics, where you will see a variety of conditions in orthopedics, otolaryngology, urology and general pediatric surgery. Also included is two weeks in the Neurology Clinic and four weeks in hematology-oncology. Four weeks of the second year are dedicated to normal child development. Two rotations in the PL-2 year are available for elective experience. At the end of the second year, residents are able to assume the supervisory responsibilities necessary for the third year of pediatric training. Although there are many months of every fourth night call, over the year it averages out to every fifth night.
Pediatric Level-3 Program During the third year of our pediatric training program, residents gain supervisory experience. Four months are spent supervising on the wards and one month is spent supervising in the outpatient clinic. A one month combined experience in neonatal newborn and delivery room hones the senior residents' skills in newborn assessment, stabilization and parent counseling. Five elective rotations are available to pursue particular areas of interest. At the end of the third year, you will be well prepared to enter primary care pediatrics or to pursue fellowship training. You will be on call every fourth night for several months, but call averages every sixth night over the year. Subspecialty electives are offered in all pediatric and pediatric surgical specialists.