Residency Education

We provide broad-based exposure to general pediatrics, critical care, and subspecialty pediatrics through both clinical experience and our lecture curriculum. The subspecialty rotations are designed to model the practice of each specialty, with time spent in both inpatient care and outpatient clinics. The months in the NICU and PICU provide education in life saving resuscitation efforts, critical care, and both medical and surgical morbidities. There are several months in each year of training that are dedicated to general pediatric care in both inpatient and outpatient settings.

Didactic learning occurs twice daily during morning report and noon conference. Morning report at Lucile Packard is a case-based session, with an interactive approach to learning the steps of diagnosis and management of conditions seen in patients cared for by the residents themselves. Noon conference is divided between a general pediatric lecture series and subspecialty topics that rotate monthly and relate to material identified as relevant to our population and the American Board of Pediatrics. Morning report and noon conference occurs daily both at LPCH and SCVMC. In order to foster a focus on evidence based medicine, Junior and Senior residents deliver Journal club at both Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (SCVMC). The Teaching Seniors also take an active role in didactic education as they learn to develop their teaching styles. Grand Rounds occurs weekly at both LPCH and SCVMC, allowing the entire community an opportunity to hear from experts about recent developments in pediatrics. Residents and medical students also have the opportunity to attend weekly Chairman’s Rounds where senior faculty members help to dissect interesting cases on the wards.

Our curriculum is in a state of continuous quality improvement. Curriculum change occurs with active involvement of housestaff and faculty. Overseeing this process are the Program Director, the Associate Program Directors, the chief residents, and the Residency Council. The active participation and collaboration of faculty and housestaff creates a comfortable educational environment that truly distinguishes our training program.

With ample elective and subspecialty selective time in every year of training, we encourage residents to explore all fields of pediatrics with special attention to those that may be relevant to their careers.
During the intern year, residents are exposed to a wide variety of specialties and potential mentors to help them formulate a career plan and identify areas of special interest. During the second and third years of residency, all trainees have 6 call free electives (3 months PGY2 year and 3 months PGY3 year) to further individualize their training.
Of those 6 months, residents spend:

• 1-4 months Scholarly Concentration/Scholarly Project
• 2-5 months Clinical Subspecialization

Electives include Adolescent Medicine, Allergy/Immunology, Anesthesia/Sedation, Cardiology, CVICU, Dermatology, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Genetics, Infectious Diseases, Neurology, Nephrology, Nephrology ICU, Ophthalmology, Oncology, Primary Care Pediatrics, Pulmonology, Radiology, Rheumatology, Surgical Subspecialties (Peds Surgery, ENT, Orthopedics, Urology), Transport, Vascular Access, and other “Design your own electives”.  A number of residents also do away electives at other institutions and/or international electives.

In addition, the residents have the opportunity for more specialized educational opportunities.  Several of the scholarly concentrations have specialized rotations for further skill development (Advocacy (StAT), Medical Education, QI/PI, Global Health, Clinical Research). 

The Department of Pediatrics faculty is an extraordinarily talented group of clinicians, teachers, research scientists, and child advocates. Their world-class clinical and research programs in children’s health provide our pediatric residents with exciting educational opportunities. In addition to our university faculty, we have a large and talented group of community-based faculty that provide teaching and mentoring in all of our affiliated sites.

Housestaff have access to the Lane Medical Library at Stanford University School of Medicine. The print collection houses 30,000 rare/historical works, 165,700 print book titles and 15,917 periodical titles (404,307 volumes). The library’s website offers an outstanding compilation of online information resources, including eJournals, eBooks, databases, calculators, Image and PDA tools. Lane Library digital collection is currently composed of over 4,500 journal titles, over 600 databases and over 5,700 books. In addition, Stanford SKOLAR, MD Consult and OVID are available for all residents via the Stanford University Network. Residents are able to access this site on campus and from off site locations.

LCPH is a leader in the field of clinical information technology with an expanding electronic medical record. Throughout Packard and SCVMC, numerous computer stations allow easy access to the internet and online medical resources. In addition, Lucile Packard has recently unveiled team laptops to complement our COW's or computers on wheels which assist physicians and nurses to bring patient care directly to the bedside. Whether showing a parent the results of a CT scan or looking up laboratory values when rounding, staff applaud this new innovation. Remote access from your home computer to the medical information system at LPCH or to the Stanford University Information Systems is also available and is free of charge. Our satellite sites are also in the process of moving towards electronic health record systems.

The Housestaff website was initially started to enable text paging of residents; however, the website has evolved into a portal for housestaff to access weekly calendars, on-call schedules, online resources, rotation guides, curricular materials for each rotation, and PDF copies of morning reports, noon conferences, and other key lectures.