Our Facilities and Technologies
Wake Forest School of Medicine provides an ideal training environment for gastroenterology fellows. You’ll work alongside expert faculty in ultramodern medical facilities with the latest treatments and technology. You’ll also treat a diverse patient population experiencing a broad range of digestive disorders.
Digestive Health Center
The Digestive Health Center of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center offers the region’s most experienced experts in digestive diseases and the most advanced equipment and procedures to diagnose and treat gastrointestinal diseases.
Our Endoscopy Suite has state-of-the art equipment, a highly trained nursing staff, a full-service anesthesia team, and an environment sensitive to patient comfort and privacy. More than 16,000 endoscopic procedures are performed each year. Patients come to the center from throughout the Southeast with digestive problems that range from the common to the very unusual and complex.
The Digestive Health Center consists of five distinct areas:
- The Shepherd Street Clinic, where fellows work one-on-one with faculty in their private general GI and subspecialty clinics.
- The Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Fellows’ Continuity Clinic, where consultations take place in a comfortable outpatient setting where gastrointestinal disorders are diagnosed and treated by our faculty.
- The Endoscopy Suite, where endoscopy and colonoscopy procedures are performed and the small bowel is examined by capsule endoscopy.
- The Gastrointestinal Neuromuscular Disorders Center, where pH, manometric and electrical disorders of the esophagus and stomach are diagnosed by 24-hour pH and impedance monitoring, electrogastrography, esophageal manometry, anorectal manometry and breath tests.
- The Advanced Endoscopy Center, where the most complex endoscopic procedures are performed. The hepatobiliary and pancreatic disorders (HBP) service, one of the most active in the state, currently performs approximately 700 therapeutic endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) procedures and 1,200 endoscopic ultrasounds (EUS) annually. Among the unique services offered at the Digestive Health Center are combined EUS and ERCP under a single sedation at a single visit for evaluation of jaundice due to pancreas or biliary diseases.
Special endoscopy services such as endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) for large polyps and Barrett's lesions, Barrx for Barrett’s esophagus, chromoendoscopy for dysplasia surveillance in inflammatory bowel disease, and both colonoscopic and oral encapsulated fecal microbial transplantation for recurrent C. difficile infection are also provided in the Advanced Endoscopy Center.
VA Medical Center
The W. G. (Bill) Hefner VA Medical Center in Salisbury, NC is a primary and secondary inpatient health care center that serves approximately 300,000 veterans living in a 24-county area of the Central Piedmont Region of North Carolina. This also includes the Charlotte area, with over 100,000 veterans, and the Winston-Salem area, with 65,000 veterans.
Inpatient services include acute medicine, cardiology, surgery, psychiatry, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and sub-acute and extended care. Primary and specialized outpatient services are provided at the medical center complex and the community-based outpatient clinics.
The VA GI unit consists of four endoscopy suites and eight exam rooms in the GI clinic. Approximately 2,100 procedures are performed annually.
Additional Facilities
Additional facilities available to fellows include:
- A dedicated fellows work area in the GI office
- Computers for data processing, database management and performing MEDLINE searches
- Work rooms for the inpatient teams to perform rounds
- Coy Carpenter Library, which is fully computerized and contains over 100,000 volumes
- A health club located within the medical school building
- Tennis courts and swimming pool at the Graylyn Conference Center
- A comprehensive daycare facility located directly within the Medical Center