CVT Surgical residents orientation

Introduction

The physicians and staff of CVT Surgical Center and CVT Vascular Lab would like to welcome you to our service. Our goal is to make your rotation an effective modality to learn more about cardiovascular surgery in a private setting. This service currently has eight attending surgeons, 3 of which are vascular surgeons and 5 of which are cardiac and thoracic surgeons. The office includes a busy vascular lab performing thousands of studies a year with expert technologists. All of us are interested in teaching and continuing education and we are excited to integrate resident training into our practice.

Attending Surgeon Assignment

You will be assigned an attending surgeon as your primary contact person. If he is in town, he will direct your activities during those days and you should participate in the majority of his cases or alternatively any other cases that he deems valuable performed by one of the partners.

Locations

We want you to treat all three hospitals, Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, Baton Rouge General-Mid-City & Bluebonnet, as equally accessible and we want you to go wherever there is an interesting case or where your assignment takes you. We hope you will spend time in our office, especially in the vascular lab learning the studies that are available and the indications, in the clinic seeing patients with attending surgeons, and in the conference room studying.

Responsibilities

We would expect you to come to work at 6:45 a.m. and see patients in CSU or SICU and to work or study until 5:00 p.m. As house officers, you are permitted to write notes on the charts, labeled CVT resident. We would like you to see patients that are in the hospital preoperatively, talk with them and get an understanding of what sort of complaints lead up to the patients being referred for surgery, what the indications are for the common operations that we perform, be they clinical, radiographic or laboratory. We want you to participate in the operating room as much as possible, either with your assigned attending surgeon or with any other surgeon on the service that is involved in an interesting case. We expect you to see the patients postoperatively and to gain an understanding of acute cardiac and vascular physiology and management of acute problems in the early postoperative period and also to follow the patients throughout their recovery in the hospital. You will be on a call schedule where one resident will be assigned to each night, available to be called out to assist with an operation. We would hope that you would go to the literature for unusual problems and bring to our attention current modalities of treatment or alternative therapies of which we might not be aware.

Conferences

There are several conferences during the month in which you should try and participate. On Thursday afternoons conferences at Earl K. Long. On Thursday mornings at 7:00 a.m., every other week there is a chest conference at Mid-City. There is a tumor conference every other week at 7:00 a.m. Wednesday that alternates between Mid-City and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center. Dr. Conners will try and have a 6:00 a.m. vascular presentation of a subject on Tuesday mornings. Dr. Rigby or myself will try and do a similar hour on Wednesday at noon related to cardiac or thoracic surgery.

Office

We want you to have the run of the office and all of our books are available if you want to look something up in the conference room at the back of the office. There is a reading shelf where there are 20-30 textbooks available including the books we expect you to read from, Sabiston, Cameron, Moore and Mattox for trauma. Attached is a syllabus that outlines the relevant page numbers in the textbooks and we certainly expect you to have at least read the textbook material concerning common cases that we perform at CVT Surgical Center.

Answering Service

Our answering service is called Lucy’s. The number is 387-1918. Any of us can be reached almost any time by calling this number, but for certain the physician on call can be contacted.

Testing

We will administer a 75 question test at the end of the month, (cardiac, vascular, thoracic) which will be directly from the textbook. We might administer a short oral examination just to get you in the mood for your forthcoming general surgery orals or whatever subspecialty you are planning to pursue.

Surgery Schedule

The service, being a surgery service, revolves around the surgery schedule. The schedule is available on Sherrie’s desk until 6:00 at night. You can also review the schedule by asking the clerk at the surgery desk at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center the number if 765-8830 and for Baton Rouge General Hospital Bluebonnet it is 763-4164 and for Baton Rouge General Hospital Mid-City it is 387-7750. We expect that you would know the surgery schedule and have a plan as to which cases you would like to participate in and hopefully have read something about that type of case before participating.