Graduate Medical Education

[MUSIC PLAYING] When I think about why a person would choose University of Chicago for graduate medical education, I think about three wonderful things that make this a great place to learn. One is our patients. We have a really wonderful and diverse group of patients. They really range from the most powerful to the most under-resourced.

That brings diversity with respect to medical conditions that residents and physicians end up seeing, and then we're helping out these individuals who really need our attention.

It's a great facility. University of Chicago is located on one campus. That makes us unique because all of our learners have access, not only to the wonderful physicians and staff here, but the entire campus. And it's a great place for collaboration, for new discoveries, and continuing education.

We're unique in that Comer Children's Hospital is within the larger University of Chicago Medicine, and so we have an opportunity to really focus on pediatric care, but within a larger context. And I think that kind of philosophy extends throughout all of our training programs, where we're not just specializing in pediatrics. We're also understanding the child in context, and so we work in a really interdisciplinary and interprofessional kind of way.

Each July, when we get new trainees here, it brings a new life and a new breath of freshness into the institution. There's a palpable sense of excitement, both from the trainees and from the faculty. And there's nothing more rewarding than to see someone come in as a timid new doctor and leave as an accomplished, and confident, and eminently competent physician.

We're here at the University of Chicago because we have a commitment to teaching the next generation of future leaders in American surgery, and I believe that it's in the process of teaching them that we learn ourselves.

So I think the GME program is strong because it encompasses all of the specialties across the institution. It allows the program directors to exchange information and to collaborate on various activities that promote education amongst the residents.

I find it not only gratifying to see the benefits for an individual patient, but it's also intellectually very stimulating and exciting to see what happens when you bring different domains together in one.

And so patients are complicated, and sometimes, they have issues or concerns that are out of your area of expertise. And so being able to collaborate and communicate with physicians outside of your specialty is important for those patients because you want to give them that specific care that they need.

As long as you're smart, and you're hardworking, and the ideas are good, even though they're unconventional, we give them a chance. We don't assume that they're correct, obviously, but we give them a chance to prove that their idea is better than everybody else's. And that is not something that you can take for granted every institution.

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