Our residency program is based at four large hospitals located in Central Arkansas, including a world-class university hospital, a large, complex Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center located adjacent to the university hospital, the largest private hospital in central Arkansas, and one of the largest freestanding children’s hospitals in the U.S. The clinical rotations at these hospitals are four to eight weeks in duration.
UAMS Medical Center
The UAMS Medical Center is a 490-bed tertiary care medical center and the flagship hospital of the residency program. The current hospital opened in January of 2009 and includes 22 state-of-the-art operating rooms. The majority of the full-time faculty practice at UAMS and most of the resident activities are centered on this campus. This hospital serves as a state-wide referral center for trauma, transplantation, and complex oncologic and general surgical cases. At UAMS, residents gain experience in general and acute care surgery, vascular and endovascular surgery, surgical oncology, transplantation, thoracic surgery, plastic surgery and surgical critical care.
John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital
John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital is a 280-bed tertiary VA medical center that is contiguous to the UAMS campus. This medical center has 500,000 outpatient visits each year, making it one of the larger VA health care systems in the country. At CAVHS the residents are supervised by five full-time faculty surgeons and a number of surgeons who have dual appointments shared between the VA and UAMS. At the CAVHS, our residents learn to care for patients with basic and complex general, vascular and thoracic surgical diseases such as abdominal wall hernias, GI malignancies, abdominal aortic aneurysms, peripheral vascular occlusive disease, and lung cancer.
Baptist Medical Center
Baptist Medical Center (BMC) is a tertiary care not-for-profit, community hospital located in Little Rock that serves as a site for a fourth-year resident elective in general and thoracic surgery. The goal of this rotation is to provide our residents clinical experiences in general and thoracic surgery in an urban private practice setting. The residents are supervised by a select group of volunteer faculty individually recruited by the program director based on their established record excellence in resident education. These faculty hold teaching faculty appointments in the Surgery Residency Program and supervise all patient care provided by residents.
Arkansas Children’s Hospital
Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) is the statewide pediatric referral center and the center for excellence in pediatric care for the state of Arkansas. This 336-bed hospital is one of the largest standalone children’s hospitals in the United States. Our pediatric surgery service performs over 2400 cases per year. Our pediatric surgery residents average between 1000 and 1400 operative cases during their fellowship. Our state-of-the-art Neonatal Intensive Care Unit currently has 90 beds (and is expanding) and provides a good mix and volume of neonatal index cases. As one of two hospitals in the only pediatric health system in our state (population 2.7 million), Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) serves as “the” tertiary pediatric facility in Arkansas with two full-time helicopters, a fixed-wing aircraft and several ground transport units.