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Fellowships
Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine
Overview The Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship Program at Loyola University Medical Center offers a comprehensive program of quality patient care, research and education. We have dynamic faculty devoted to teaching and mentoring the next generation of leaders in the field of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. Loyola University Health System provides a broad range of patient experience with approximately 1,000 acute care beds of which 150 are adult intensive care beds. The University hospital is rated as having the highest patient acuity level in Illinois. The lung transplantation program is one of only seven programs to have performed over 500 transplants. We have an active Sleep Center and perform over 1,300 sleep studies at Loyola and another 1,000 at the Hines VA hospital. We have a growing Interventional Bronchoscopy program that performs stenting, laser endobronchial ultrasound and brachytherapy. Hines VA Hospital is the largest in the Midwest and is a referral base for other VA hospitals. RML Specialty Hospital is a community-based long-term acute care facility that provides chronic care to patients with complex medical issues and patients needing prolonged mechanical ventilation. The Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine consists of 12 full-time and 2 part-time faculty members. Research projects with extramural funding (NIH and VA Merit Review) include research into cellular mechanisms of acute lung injury, lung rejection in transplantation, control of breathing, respiratory muscle function, mechanisms of patient ventilator interactions, lung infection, sleep disordered breathing, exercise rehabilitation and COPD. Loyola University Medical Center has a fully accredited and highly competitive three-year combined Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship Program with a total complement of 12 clinical fellows. The fellows are trained to be skilled physician-scientists through intense clinical exposure and several months devoted to research. Fellowship strength in critical care medicine lies in its vast resource of critically ill patients, active critical care research by faculty members, and close teaching affiliation with other specialties. Goals and Program Content The subspecialty fellowship program in both pulmonary disease and critical care medicine will provide training and supervised experience at a sufficient level to acquire the competency of a specialist in both disciplines. The combined training program is 3 years in duration of which 18 to 24 months are devoted to clinical training. The clinical experience in pulmonary disease will include opportunities to observe and manage inpatients and outpatients with a wide variety of pulmonary disorders. Fellows will have the opportunity to assume continuing responsibility for acutely and chronically ill patients in order to learn the natural history of pulmonary disease, as well as the effectiveness of therapeutic programs. There will be an educational emphasis on pulmonary physiology and its correlation with clinical disorders. The training in critical care medicine will provide at least 12 months of meaningful patient care responsibility in critical care units. At least six of these months will be devoted specifically to the care of critically ill medical patients. Trainees will obtain additional clinical training with experiences in neurosurgical, cardiac, cardiothoracic, high-risk pregnancy and transplantation intensive units. The trainee will have opportunities to assume responsibility under appropriate supervision for the care of patients throughout their stay in critical care units and to monitor the subsequent course of patients throughout the remainder of their hospital stay. The fellow will acquire skills required to organize, administer, and direct a critical care unit and work effectively as a member of a multidisciplinary team. The combined fellowship provides trainees with exposure to quality improvement measures in each special care area and enables each fellow to become familiar with billing and coding issues. |