Pediatric Hospital Medicine Fellowship

The UCM Comer Children’s Hospital serves as the primary site for the PHM fellowship. Comer Children’s Hospital is a university-based tertiary care center dedicated to serving the full spectrum of children’s healthcare needs from acute to chronic to complex illnesses. Comer proudly serves as the local hospital with deep community roots for the surrounding neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago as well as a referral center from nearby suburbs and into Indiana.

Fellows will complete most of their Core rotations at Comer which have been designed to reflect the strengths and breadth of the pediatric medical experts at UCM. These include inpatient hospital medicine, newborn nursery, emergency medicine, pediatric intensive care, sedation, and palliative care. All patients admitted to Comer are cared for by resident teams supervised by UCM faculty and the scope of clinical illness is vast. The PHM service admits all general pediatric patients in addition to several medical and surgical subspecialties. On the PHM rotation, fellows will lead a multidisciplinary team comprised of residents from the Pediatric Residency Training Program and medical students from The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine in addition to clinical pharmacists, a clinical librarian, social workers, registered dieticians, and case managers. Additional clinical and non-clinical electives will be tailored to each fellow’s Individualized Curriculum, career, and scholarship goals and are structured to provide an experience relevant to the practice of Pediatric Hospital Medicine.

Fellows will also have the opportunity to rotate through two additional clinical sites at which the Section of Pediatric Hospital Medicine is well-established. The complex care rotation will take place at La Rabida Children’s Hospital and the community medicine rotation will take place at Riverside Medical Center.

• Riverside Medical Center is a community hospital located south of Chicago. During the community medicine rotation at this site, fellows will care for care for hospitalized children, attend deliveries, care for newborns in the level 2 nursery, consult in the ED, and co-manage surgical patients. The site is staffed by pediatric hospitalists 24/7 who will supervise fellows during their rotation.
• La Rabida Children’s Hospital is dedicated to children with complex and chronic illnesses. Fellows on their chronic care rotation, supervised by PHM faculty who staff the hospital 24/7, will lead multidisciplinary teams which will also include residents and medical students. To meet admission criteria at La Rabida, children must be: living with a chronic illness; requiring rehabilitation after surgery, burns, brain injuries, or trauma; dependent on technology like ventilators, tracheostomies, or NG tubes; or transitioning from a neonatal or pediatric intensive care unit at another hospital.

Scholarship is an integral part of the PHM fellowship experience. Fellows will complete a scholarly project under the guidance of their Scholarship Oversight Committee and research mentor, both established at the beginning of the first year of fellowship. The fellowship research experience begins with an introduction to clinical research summer course that covers mentorship, research design, statistical analysis, clinical informatics, and the principles of evidence-based medicine. Core fellowship didactics continue throughout the year for all fellows within the Department of Pediatrics and cover a variety of topics including safety and event reporting, medical education, and advocacy. In addition to this required curriculum, additional training and courses are available in medical education, quality improvement, outcomes research, clinical informatics, and healthcare data analytics through the University of Chicago Medical Center, Booth School of Business, and Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.