Curriculum

PGY-1 Year

During the initial year of residency, you spend the majority of your time at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital (CRMH), assigned to the General Surgery, Colorectal Surgery, Trauma/Acute Care Surgery, and night float services. Additional “hands on” experience in General Surgery is gained from an extended experience at the Salem Veterans Association Medical Center complex.

PGY-2 Year

Each resident will function in the role of junior resident on one of the General Surgery services, the Acute Care Surgery service, and the ICU service. The remaining time is shared between surgical endoscopy and the breast care services. All rotations are at CRMH.

PGY-3 Year

During this critically important “turning point” year you will get your first real taste of senior level responsibility at CRMH, under supervision of dedicated attending staff members, as the chief of the trauma/general surgery ICU service—under which you will have a cadre of junior level house officers to hone your teaching skills. In addition, the Pediatric and Thoracic Surgery services are yours to manage. You will spend time in the more traditional role of junior level resident on one of the larger General Surgery group practices at CRMH. Finally, your American Board of Surgery requirement in Transplantation experience is fulfilled at the University of Virginia.

PGY-4 Year

To provide you with the opportunity to assume the full mantle of a senior level house officer, a blend of three month long rotations is available. For six months, you will interchange roles with another of your colleagues as the senior most  resident on the CRMH trauma service, and as the chief resident on the CRMH night float service, responsible for managing the acutely ill (trauma and general surgery) patient consults. You will of course have the immediate support of dedicated faculty trauma/acute care surgeons who take in-hospital call with you on a rotating 24 hour basis. Finally, you will be mentored in the ways of community surgical practice as the senior-most resident on the Vascular Surgery service and on the General Surgery service at the Carilion New River Valley Hospital-- located just outside Blacksburg, Virginia (home of Virginia Tech University).

PGY-5 Year

This final year of training exposes the house officers to the complexities of surgical decision-making in several venues, all of which are within CRMH. Six months are equally distributed among the two large General Surgery services, with an additional three months being spent on the Vascular Surgery service. For the remaining three months, you are the surgeon in charge of the resident-run Acute Care Surgery service.

Call Policies

As one should expect from any resident training program, all AGGME-established guidelines for work hours are readily met. Within this training program, approximately one-third of our residents are assigned to rotations that have a small home call commitment, a system made possible by the creation of a junior and senior resident night float system. The remaining rotations have a frequency of in-hospital call that, viewed across those rotations, averages less than one in six days.

Operative Experience

There are no surgical fellowship programs in the Carilion General Surgical Residency. Because of this, general surgery residents are exposed to a tremendous surgical experience in terms of breadth and complexity of operative cases. The teaching faculty members are committed to allow qualified residents perform these operations as chief surgeon. Hence, over the past two years, the graduates of our program conducted an average of 1,200 major operations (with well over 300 majors as surgeon chief).