Mission Statement
The University of Connecticut School of Medicine Anesthesiology Residency Program has been established to prepare physicians to be consultants in Anesthesiology. Residents learn the basic and clinical science of Anesthesiology, the ability to apply knowledge to new problems, the ability and desire to continue to build a knowledge base throughout their career and the ability to critically evaluate scientific research.
Program Aims
Clinical Care: Through a progression of rotations dealing with increasingly-challenging cases, residents learn both basic and advanced clinical skills. These include regional anesthesia (residents typically get 3-6 times the required minimums of regional blocks, spinals, and epidurals), ultrasound guided regional anesthesia and line placement, perioperative ultrasound (POCUS), transesophageal echocardiography, etc.
Scholarly Activity: All residents give two presentations to the department during their residency. The topics are chosen by the resident, who works with his/her adviser on preparing the presentation. Also, all residents are required to submit (with a faculty adviser) at least one paper for presentation at a scientific meeting. Many of these are challenging cases, but some are original research or reviews. Residents are also encouraged to submit their findings for publication. Evaluation of Published Research: Our program has a statistics review as part of its didactic curriculum. Residents learn the basics of descriptive and inferential statistics, and are able to perform simple analyses such as t-tests and chi-squared tests. For our Journal Club, all residents are required to submit a critical review of one of the presented papers. These are graded, and the resident with the highest average grade is the program director's guest at the AUA annual meeting.
Patient Safety: All residents receive training on how to confidentially submit a near miss or patient safety event at each of our locations. In addition, all residents receive training on how to perform an Apparent Cause Analysis (with many residents participating in performing such an analysis on an actual event.)
Highlights
Provide residents with a large number of clinically challenging cases encompassing the wide variety of cases they are likely to encounter upon entering unsupervised practice.
- Resident case assignments are based on educational value rather than manpower needs.
- Residents exceed all case number requirements (often by a multiple of 2-4) without sharing cases.
Provide residents with a variety of didactic learning experiences including conferences, simulation sessions, and preparation for oral board and OSCE examinations.
- All residents are relieved for conferences.
- Case conferences include distribution of relevant publications to encourage informed discussion.
Prepare residents to interpret newly reported research findings.
- Journal clubs with in-depth discussion of recently-published research.
- Most residents attend/present at two national meetings.
- Statistics course to promote understanding of basic principles.
Encourage residents to be advocates for their patients and for the medical specialty of anesthesiology.
- Quarterly meetings of the Connecticut State Society of Anesthesiologists are part of our educational program - residents are relieved of clinical duties to attend.
- Resident delegates are provided with away time to attend the annual ASA Resident House of Delegates meeting.
Promote resident wellness and morale during training.
- Residents generally relieved by 5:00 to 5:30 p.m. when not on call.
- Group wellness activities (e.g, fun runs, pool parties, therapy dog).
- Resident wellness sessions during didactics.