Message From the Program Director
Thank you for your interest in the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Fellowship Program at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital!
As a newly accredited fellowship, we offer the resources of a large academic institution with the opportunities for growth and creativity of an ever-evolving program. I am honored to lead this fellowship program with the help and support of a truly amazing hospitalist section. Here are just a few reasons why:
Our hospitalists are simply the best. We’re enthusiastic, supportive and we love working together. We’re a section that loves teaching, so we’re all excited to add fellows to our experiences with medical students and residents. Our fellowship is designed so your presence augments the residents’ education (and vice versa) without detracting from anyone’s experience. Check out our faculty page or our Instagram for a glimpse of our faculty and how we interact with each other inside and outside the hospital. We have a variety of people of different backgrounds, family makeups, life experiences, and we’re always excited to meet new people who want to join us.
We play many key roles in our hospital besides just being stellar clinicians. Some of the roles currently held by our hospitalists include medical director of the Operations Center, chair of the Acute Care Committee, director of the medical student pediatrics clerkship, Trauma Council member, vice chair of education, Medical Informatics subspecialty leader, Infection Prevention and Control committee member, and many more. We have nine pediatric hospital medicine subspecialty board-certified hospitalists and numerous core faculty members and resident advisors for the pediatric residency program.
Our hospital is the largest pediatric hospital in the state, and part of the only pediatric health system in Arkansas. This means we have a huge catchment area, so you will have experience with a high volume of patients as well as complex and unusual cases. We work closely with our talented subspecialists and have presented and published multiple case reports on the rare cases and interesting patients we are privileged to care for. ACH has a strong devotion to quality and safety, with an effective Watcher program that has had a great impact on patient safety, daily hospital and system-wide Safety Huddles, and many multidisciplinary teams and projects constantly striving to help make the children of Arkansas better today and healthier tomorrow.
Our curriculum is the result of a lot of hard work and collaboration. ACH leadership and other sections throughout the Department of Pediatrics share our excitement and are helping us to offer a strong, well-rounded curriculum with a wide variety of electives and individualized curriculum options. You can choose from electives like our longitudinal Sedation rotation, a hands-on Ultrasound month, and Complex Care with the opportunity to work with multidisciplinary teams for children with chronic and complex diseases. You’ll rotate on both our teaching and direct-care hospital medicine teams, with an emphasis on training to be an educator and team leader. You want research? We’ve got plenty! Those interested in quality improvement have access to Improvement U, a module-based longitudinal curriculum that pairs you directly with an expert from ACH’s Quality Department to guide you through your project. Are pathways your thing? We’ll hook you up with our Clinical Effectiveness Department, where we research, build, and analyze data from our clinical pathways. You like good old-fashioned databases? We’re a PHIS hospital and we have an award-winning IS department who can also help with Epic SlicerDicer, TriNetX, or probably any other database you can find. In addition to a strong core curriculum, we offer the resources and flexibility to adapt the curriculum to your needs and career goals. If we don’t have it yet, you can help us build it!
Our city is also amazing, and is quite the hidden gem* if you haven’t been here. Arkansas is known as The Natural State and Little Rock offers many beautiful outdoor options. You can walk or bike along the Arkansas River Trail, hike up Pinnacle Mountain, check out the view from the Big Dam Bridge — and that’s just within the city! We sometimes get a little snow but have overall mild winters; spring and fall are absolutely beautiful, and summer — okay it’s hot and humid and there are mosquitoes, but we have air conditioning and pools and lakes and rivers!
*Arkansas is home to the only active diamond mine where the public can dig for diamonds! With a little luck, you can pay off your med school debt! (No promises).
We hope you find our program as amazing as we do. Browse through our site to learn more about our section and our fellowship. Please feel free to contact me with any questions!
Sincerely,
Rebecca Cantu, M.D., MPH
Fellowship Program Director
Email: rmcantu@uams.edu
Contact Us
Rebecca Cantu, M.D., MPH
Fellowship Program Director
rmcantu@uams.edu
Stephanie Veach
Program Coordinator
sveach@uams.edu