St. Luke's Roosevelt Department of Anesthesiology

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Clinical Base Year
This year is intended to provide a foundation for anesthesia training and the choice of program is largely left to the discretion of the anesthesiology resident, provided it meets the criteria set out by the ABA. It may be done at any ACGME or LCME accredited institution, and while many internships provide good experience for anesthesiology training, our Department strongly suggests residents choose rotations that serve as the foundation of anesthetic theory and knowledge, such as critical care, cardiology, pulmonology, renal medicine, and emergency medicine.

Clinical Anesthesia 1 (CA-1) year
As your first solid year of anesthesiology training, you will learn the basic knowledge and skills necessary to safely manage a routine anesthetic. CA-1s are paired with one attending for their first month, allowing personalized attention to each resident’s educational needs and individual skill sets. Your first month can be a scary time as an “anesthesia guppy”, and this Departmental mentorship program is designed to safely and quickly build a baseline level of confidence. Daily introductory lectures supplement the early clinical exposure, and residents’ progress is frequently evaluated with the use of the Anesthesia Knowledge Test (AKT), a standardized test taken at the beginning and end of your first month, and then at 6 and 18 months during residency. CA-1s spend approximately six months at each of the two sites, including one month at St. Luke’s in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit.

Clinical Anesthesia 2 (CA-2) year
Ah, now you’re really rolling. This is the year to start to flex your anesthesiology muscles and begin to learn some subspecialty anesthesia. CA-2s rotate through cardiac anesthesia, obstetric anesthesia, neuroanesthesia, pediatric anesthesia, regional anesthesia, pain management, and spend an additional month in critical care. Special rotations in airway management are also undertaken.

Regional Anesthesia
St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Anesthesiology is particularly proud of its reputation and continued excellence in training outstanding regional anesthesiologists. As part of your training here, you will easily perform more peripheral nerve blocks in three years than most anesthesiologists perform in a decade of practice. The depth and breadth of skill exhibited by not just one or two, but almost all of the faculty means that you will graduate as an expert regionalist, fully competent in upper limb, lower limb, paravertebral and neuraxial blockade.

Cardiac Anesthesia
The cardiac division provides anesthesia to over 500 patients each year undergoing procedures requiring cardiopulmonary bypass. Besides becoming intimately familiar with the complex physiology of CPB, residents look forward to this rotation for the opportunities it presents to place and manage invasive lines, as well as to develop skills in intraoperative echocardiography, for which several members of this Department are internationally recognized.

Obstetric Anesthesia
During this rotation, residents manage the anesthetic and analgesic needs of a very busy obstetric service, which includes a significant number of high-risk pregnancies. You can’t help but become an expert in epidural, spinal and combined spinal-epidural techniques, but the main educational thrust of this rotation is the development of the knowledge and judgment with which to approach the wide variety of complex and often emergent maternal and fetal problems that present on this service.

Pain Management
Preventing and treating pain is an integral part of what we do as anesthesiologists, and the Department’s commitment to pain education is reflected in these rotations. Acute pain is evaluated and treated daily with a variety of modalities including regional anesthesia techniques such as peripheral nerve catheters. Chronic pain is an extremely popular rotation, as residents are actively involved in the multidisciplinary approach to pain problems, including the performance of a wide variety of nerve blocks, ablative techniques, and implantable technologies.

Pediatric Anesthesia
Kids can be cute but their anesthetic management is often scary for the uninitiated. The anatomical and physiological factors that make pediatric anesthetic different are the focus of these two exciting months, and by the end you’ll be a smooth operator. Residents experience everything from neonates to teenagers, from bread-and-butter tonsils to life-threatening congenital malformations or syndromes. One of the two months is spent at the Children’s Hospital of New York at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Clinical Anesthesia 3 (CA-3) Year
It’s good to be king. Now you’re in the driver’s seat, and have the opportunity to tailor your last 12 months of residency to match your clinical or academic interest. All residents are offered elective rotations outside St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center and include one month of thoracic anesthesia at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, one month of vascular anesthesia at Lenox Hill Hospital, and one month of advanced pediatric anesthesia at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In addition, senior residents are offered the choice of either Advanced Clinical Track, or the Clinical Scientist Track, as recommended by the American Board of Anesthesiology.

Didactic Program
Anesthesiology is a cerebral specialty, and while there’s a lot of on-the-job learning that goes on in the operating room, labor floor and pain clinic, it must be complemented with specific, directed teaching, and we’re big on that. The formal didactic program consists of the following:

Core Lectures: CA-1 and CA-2 classes receive focused teaching every Wednesday morning prior to Case Conference. By the end of your CA-1 year, you will have covered in detail the entire content of the basic anesthesiology textbook provided by the department. In your CA-2 year, the interactive lectures are aimed at specialty and complex anesthetic issues.

Written Board Review: The CA-3 residents meet once a week with a faculty advisor to work through practice written board questions, with the aim of stimulating discussion and a thorough understanding of the reason for each question. In this manner, hundreds and hundreds of questions are completed prior to sitting the examination after residency.

Mock Oral Examinations: Each month one CA-3 resident is “grilled” in the exact style of an ABA oral exam, by two actual ABA oral examiners. Following the exam, the entire resident body is debriefed on positive points and areas for improvement, such that by the time one completes their residency here, they have “been through” 36 oral exams.

Case Conference: Every Wednesday morning the entire Department convenes to discuss an interesting case, or one in which a complication arose.

Guest Faculty: Each month a guest professor is invited to share his/her particular area of expertise with the department, and consists of the leading of a journal club meeting and a department-wide Grand Rounds lecture. The Department is consistently able to attract guest faculty of international renown and expertise.

Core Competency Lectures: These are weekly lectures given by faculty to the resident body dealing with various aspects relating to the six core competencies as outline by the ACGME.

Subspecialty-Specific Rounds: Many of the subspecialty rotations have particular didactic sessions during each month (e.g. obstetric anesthesia, pre-anesthetic clinic, post-anesthetic care unit)

Residency training program department of anesthesiology. @2007 St. Lukes Roosevelt a member of Continuum Health Partners.