Inpatient and outpatient training exposes the fellows to a wide breadth of vascular surgery patients at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Clinical and operative training proceeds through progressively increasing responsibility to allow the fellow to become a skilled, independent vascular surgeon.
Operative and catheter-based procedures
Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center is a tertiary care facility situated in Northern New England. The Section of Vascular Surgery performed roughly 2,000 procedures in both the operating room and angiography suite last year. Fellows will perform the complete gamut of complex open, endovascular and hybrid procedures in all operative settings, finishing in the greater than 95th percentile for all operative categories.
Conferences
Teaching conferences are held each Monday from 7:00 to 11:00 am during protected time when all faculty and trainees can attend. These conferences include:
- Preoperative conference for that week's open and interventional cases
- Didactic conference covering a comprehensive core curriculum (SCORE curriculum)
- Interesting case conference
- Morbidity and mortality (M&M) conference
- Journal club
- Research conference
- Vascular laboratory conference
- "How I Do It" technical pearls conference
- VSAP conference
- Heart and Vascular Center (HVC) Grand Rounds conferences, featuring lectures from leaders in health care and in our specialty
Vascular residents actively participate and contribute to these conferences to establish their own decision-making and teaching skills.
Research
The Section of Vascular Surgery has a long-standing national reputation for its contributions to our specialty. Faculty within the Section have maintained active extramural funding to support this mission. The Section is also a leader in supporting clinical trials to advance practice. A wide array of research disciplines, including outcomes, health services research, quality improvement, health policy, and basic science, are all ongoing.
Trainees are encouraged to select research projects as part of their fellowship experience.
Vascular laboratory
Vascular laboratory training is provided in an IAC-accredited laboratory administered by the section, which performs roughly 15,000 studies per year. Residents will obtain hands-on duplex scanning experience and a didactic curriculum to facilitate Registered Physician in Vascular Interpretation (RPVI) certification.