The fellowship takes advantage of multiple specialized critical care units, faculty with diverse training backgrounds, and an extensive educational/didactic experience to offer a broad multi-disciplinary training experience. Elective flexibility allows fellows to tailor their education to the components of critical care that complement and expand upon their previous training with a focus on pursuing future career goals.

Clinical Rotations

Clinical rotations occur primarily at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, which is a tertiary referral academic medical center located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The hospital has the full complement of specialty ICUs and serves as a referral center for central and western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. Recently, a unique community ICU rotation was added to the fellowship that occurs at High Point Medical Center, which is a regional hospital located approximately 30 minutes away from the main campus.

Core rotations occur in the following Intensive Care Units:

  • Cardiovascular ICU
    • Includes CT Surgery, ECMO, and Advanced Heart Failure
  • High Point Community ICU
    • Busy, high acuity mixed medical-surgical ICU
  • Medical ICU
  • Neurosciences ICU
    • Includes Neurology and Neurosurgery
  • Surgical ICU
  • Trauma ICU

Critical Care fellows have in-depth interaction with residents, APPs, pharmacists, fellows, and attending physicians from each of these specialties, further broadening their training and experience.

Bedside ultrasound utilization is immediately available in each of the critical care units and taught throughout the program. Fellows are actively engaged in ICU triage, quality improvement (QI) and other administrative functions as they pursue their training.

Additional and elective rotations include:

  • Advanced Heart Failure
  • Anesthesiology/OR experience
  • Burn ICU
  • Bronchoscopy
  • Coronary Care Unit
  • ECMO/Perfusion
  • Infectious Diseases, Nephrology, Pulmonary or other subspecialty electives
  • Oncology ICU
  • Pediatric ICU
  • Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS)
  • Research
  • Toxicology
  • Transesophageal (TEE) echocardiography

Other disciplines are also available for elective rotations.

While we do not have formal tracks built into the curriculum, there is sufficient elective flexibility and faculty guidance to allow for your training experience to be catered to support your future career goals. Additionally, we now offer pursuit of board certification via the Examination of Special Competence in Critical Care Echocardiography (CCEeXAM) as a longitudinal experience.

On Call Responsibilities

There is a mix of night float rotations, swing shifts, and some overnight call - all designed to mimic the experience of practicing intensivists.

Conferences and Didactics

Each academic year begins with an intensive two-month introductory didactic lecture schedule covering topics at the core of Critical Care Medicine, and includes hands-on sessions for airway management, point-of-care ultrasound, ventilator management, and other aspects of ICU medicine.

Throughout the remainder of the year, we move to our weekly Critical Care Grand Rounds schedule, which is a multidisciplinary conference dedicated to topic discussions relevant to critical care. The conference is led by fellows, attending physicians, or other healthcare professionals, both from within our Critical Care section and from outside of our department. Fellows are expected to present at Grand Rounds with opportunities including:

  • Topic reviews
  • Case reports
  • Journal club
  • Morbidity and mortality conference
  • Research updates

Research Opportunities

Each fellow will have between two and four months per year of fellowship dedicated to the pursuit of scholarly activity under the guidance of one or more of the attending faculty. This may take the form of clinical research, bench research, quality improvement, or another suitable academic project. Accomplished researcher Dr. Ashish Khanna serves as the primary mentor and coordinator of the research efforts of our Critical Care fellows. It is anticipated that each fellow will be able to complete and submit at least one peer-reviewed abstract or article for publication during the fellowship.