CARLE FOUNDATION HOSPITAL OMFS RESIDENCY
Hello everyone. I am simply updating the very old post regarding the program I am currently in. I just finished my PGY-1 year at the Carle Foundation Hospital in Champaign-Urbana, IL. I will NOT routinely check this board, so if you have questions, please message me and I’ll try to get back to you when I can. All this information is current and is, of course, subject to change. Here is our website for cool pictures, historical stuff, more about the hospital itself, benefits as a resident, rotation schedule, etc.
https://carleconnect.com/gme/omfs.aspx
This is long, so you can skip forward to the recap at the end if you want to hear the Cliffnote version.
Residents per yr: 1 (4-yr OMS certificate, MD option at the end?)
Noncategorical interns per yr: 1
-Same job description as the PGY-1, but you don’t get to go to anesthesia
-As a rule, we don’t normally take the intern, but they have a great match rate and our program is very supportive in trying to get our interns into programs.
Attendings: 3 – Bailey DMD, MD, FACS, Sabol DDS, Norbutt DMD, MD
Fellows: 0
Accreditation: Full, without reporting requirements.
Research requirement: Usually a book chapter
Hospitals to cover while on call: 1
Location: Urbana, IL
About the location:
Champaign-Urbana is located about a 2.5 hr drive south of Chicago, IL. The main attraction in the area is the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. There’s a decent amount of stuff to do on what little off time you have, but if you’re like me and you’re from a big city and have lived there all your life, it’s a big change. But I’ve definitely visited worse (sorry Shreveport). Living here is definitely slow paced compared to what I’m used to, which is probably a good thing as a resident. Traffic is almost non-existent, especially when the students are off. Cost of living is low for my standards – $910/month for a pretty big 2 BR/1BA apartment, and I’m living in one of the most expensive apartment complexes in the area. Your salary as a resident is more than enough to compensate for the cost of living. Outside of Champaign-Urbana it’s a whole-lotta corn. Lots of freeways and cornfields until you hit another “major” city. Overall, I’m pretty happy living here. I can go out and eat some decent food (don’t go looking for a good seafood dinner here), get a drink and listen to some live music on a weekend off, or drive up to Chicago if I need some big city living for a weekend. By the way, people in the Midwest = disgustingly nice.
What we do every day:
The Carle Foundation Hospital (CFH) is the only level 1 trauma center in central IL. There’s also no helmet law in IL for those folks that ride motorcycles and ATVs – hint, hint. The OMFS department at CFH takes head & neck trauma call 365 days/year, 24 hrs/day. You will suture more faces and put more hardware in the human skull than you’d ever want to. We’re not inner-city trauma center busy, but we definitely get enough. Other residencies at the hospital are: general surgery, internal medicine, family medicine – that’s it. We are (by far) the oldest and most stable residency in the hospital. We are well-liked and established here, and that really makes a difference in the experience of our residency. You can also imagine how much we get to do when we rotate to other services like ENT, plastics, neurosurgery, trauma, general surgery, internal medicine, anesthesia, ED, etc.
We have 2 clinics – one in the hospital itself (really convenient for multiple reasons) and one about 15 min away in Champaign. Both have treatment rooms that are capable of doing IV sedations. We take referrals from outside DDS’s and MD’s for extractions, pathology, implants, orthognathic, skin lesions, clefts, etc. I’d say we can do up to 6 sedations per AM or PM session, and that will be intertwined with consults, postops, various follow-ups, procedures under local, etc. We DO NOT have a point and pull resident clinic – that’s not how we roll here. We have block time 3 days per week in the main OR, but you’ll find we operate all week whenever we need to (trauma, trachs, infections, etc). I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem scheduling an OR case outside of our block time, and these times are definitely waaay before 5 pm on average.
The intern year (PGY-1 or noncategorical) is probably the most brutal call schedule I’ve seen in any program (and I’m not exaggerating). AT BEST, the call schedule for an intern is q2days. That’s 24 hr call, no post call, you could be doing that for multiple days in a row (my record is 12), and no one wants to hear you complain about it because everyone above you did the same thing. Thankfully we take call from home. You’re almost guaranteed to go in at some point in the night when you’re on, though. And yes, all-nighters are pretty common. Hey, it’s good training. After you survive your intern year, though, from PGY-2 and on you’re considered a senior resident and take back-up call for the intern and will rarely be the primary on-call resident. Unfortunately, there’s no GPR residency here, so yes you’ll have to do dental splints and drain little baby dental abscesses. Once in a while you can get a BS toothache consult on the medicine floor as well. Our ED, for the most part, is pretty good at filtering a lot of those, though. We DO NOT extract any teeth on the floor on in the ED unless there’s pus in the neck, in which case they’ll go the OR. We also don’t put on archbars in the ED. We are always undermanned. The PGY2 and 3 switch being on off service rotations throughout the year, so we run around a lot from the OR to the ED to the clinics and back, and we really have to rely on each other.
For some reason people like to ask about didactics so here it is. Every Wed AM we try really hard to get together learn stuff outside from our own reading and experience. We do basic science lectures with General Surgery, grand rounds with them as well, trauma M&M, our own M&M, OMFS-related lectures, orthognathic case reviews, treatment plan cancer or other reconstruction cases, do stuff in the simulation lab (tissue dissection, chest tubes, tissue flaps, airway stuff, etc), and even review some board questions. I’ll be honest and say we miss this a lot due to our busy main OR. Other conferences we have are head and neck tumor board, cleft team, journal club, and review our main OR cases for the week.
Our attendings and our scope – probably the part you care the most about:
Dr Bailey, our glorious director, did a fellowship in head/neck oncology and microvascular reconstruction in Maryland. We do about 1-2 free flaps per month, and intertwined are parotidectomies, partial glossectomies, neck dissections, skin cancers, etc. You will learn a ton of medicine managing these patients (head and neck cancer pts = usually old and sick). We also do the cleft lip/palate/alveolus and VPI our cleft surgeries for the cleft palate team. We can easily do a cheilorhinoplasty, palatoplasty, lip revision, or hip graft 1-2 times per week. Dr. Bailey is one of those guys that isn’t really afraid to operate on anything above the clavicle and there’s lots of times where we get asked to help out our ENT colleagues with their cases. He has a great presence and having him alone is a good reason to want to train here. Watching him operate is also like watching an artist paint too. We get dibs on the open tracheostomies for the ICU, which means that any adult sized pt that can’t be trached bedside by the ICU team gets trached by us in the OR. We can easily do a few per week (they tend to come in waves), and they’re rarely straight-forward. Dr Norbutt did a fellowship in orthognathic surgery under Dr. Tucker. He’s the newest addition to our attendings and has been here about 3 yrs. His practice is growing quickly and our orthognathic numbers are following suit. He is very modern and treatment plans cases with virtual surgery and other cool stuff. Finally, Dr Sabol has been at Carle for about 30 yrs. He was a resident here too. He did a lot of those bigger cases, but now has mostly limited his practice to dentoalveolar stuff and soft tissue lesions. He has a huge reputation in the area and is a source for the majority of our outpatient referrals. There aren’t many people here who don’t know someone who was operated on by Dr. Sabol.
What don’t we do? Cosmetics and TMJ. If you want to do those surgeries, don’t come here. We’ll do some cosmetic stuff for trauma-related injuries or after removing lesions, and you can do some cosmetic stuff on ENT or oculoplastics, but for the most part it’s something we don’t do a lot of. We…hate…TMJ. We’ll do a joint replacement if it needed to be whacked because of a tumor or something, but no arthoplasties, discectomirs, arthrocentesis, etc here. And honestly we don’t really want to manage any of those patients. In terms of craniofacial stuff, no distractions, Le Fort 3’s, or cranial vault stuff, but our cleft patients keep us busy already.
So what’s our relationship with the attendings? We have some of the most humble, funny, approachable, and skilled attendings anyone could ask for as a resident. I can honestly talk to any of them as a friend. That said, they definitely expect a lot from us. We get a lot of freedom when it comes to managing patients, surgeries, etc. A good way to explain it is like this: I’m more afraid I’ll let them down than I am afraid of being yelled at. They also have some of the best bedside manner I’ve seen.
In terms of actually operating, we operate a lot, and we operate early. You get comfortable in the OR very early in your training here. My chief last year got to the point where he did about 90% of a neck dissections, parotidectomies, big resections, clefts, etc. He would do about 100% of the traumas, trachs, and whatever other stuff you could think of. As a non-chief resident, you will still be very hands on and you’ll be able to harvest hip, do skin grafts, trachs, trauma stuff, and start to get comfortable with the cleft and cancer stuff. In terms of orthognathic, it’s usually 50-50 attending-chief, but as an intern I did half a Le Fort with my chief, which was nice. It’s not a rare thing to see our attending reading the newspaper in the OR or just holding sticks. I know a lot of programs try to brag about how much they operate, so you can come see if I’m lying or not. And, we don’t have a fellow. Nuff said. Just keep this in mind, this isn’t a place where you’re allowed to go crazy on the patient population – the see one, do one, teach one rule definitely applies to every surgery we do, even tooth extraction. You learn to assist, and you’ll assist a lot, before you operate.
Please, just don’t ask me about numbers – they change all the time and I don’t have the info. But I can definitely say we have no problem surpassing the AAOMS requirements. Remember, it’s one resident per yr.
What do expect as an extern:
One of the reasons I made this post was to try to get more externs to come out. See our website for more info and apply. We definitely welcome externs here and we’re very open about our program to you guys. You’ll get free food and cheap housing too. We just ask that you take this seriously, work hard, take call with the interns, and actually try to get the gist of what it’s like here. We want you to have a great time and learn something along the way. This is an amazing program, but it’s also not for everyone. And as someone that’s applied for residency twice, you really can’t get an idea about a program from SDN or even the interview. An externship is really the best way to get to know what the program is really like, and more importantly, if you would be a good match there. It is 4-6 yrs of your life after all.
SUMMARY
The pros – scope of surgery, operate a lot with lots direct attending to resident time, great medical management experience, awesome attendings, great reputation in the hospital, unique off-service experience, one hospital to cover, home call, decent place to live
The cons – no GPR, undermanned all the time, brutal call schedule
Pro or con depending on you – very small program, 24/7 trauma call, very high expectations, no hand-holding, no TMJ or cosmetics, no point & pull clinic, busy busy busy
I know I said a lot, probably more than necessary honestly. And I’m sure I missed a lot of stuff that I’ll read back and wish I had put in. But for me, I would choose this program as my #1 all over again. As crazy as my intern year was, I wouldn’t want to train anywhere else. I am very happy here and I was treated very well as an intern. That really makes a difference when you’re sleep deprived and working hard and long hours every day. I’m also working with residents and attendings that I want to put in 110% for. Just remember, what you think is important in a program now is probably not going to be as important once you’re actually in it. And the best program in to train in is the one you end up in.