PGY2

PGY2 Philosophy

Make certain that surgery is your calling. Is your devotion and talent well matched? Does everyone, including peers, agree that you should be a surgeon? Have you been happy in your various rotations? Do you enjoy reading the surgical journals?

Clinical

You should be able to verbalize your judgements in a logical succinct fashion. Try to cement positive relations with the entire health care team. The second-year resident will participate in many advanced laparoscopic cases. We have a laparoscopic practice facility at MMC, and there are many opportunities for live animal surgery at training laboratories. Other state-of-the-art surgical techniques including sentinel node dissection and intraoperative ultrasound are employed extensively. The second year resident will rotate for three months at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer. There are three one-month rotations on their cancer subspecialty services which include hepatobiliary, colon, breast, pancreas, head and neck, and gastric and mixed tumors.

The resident will be responsible for admission history and physicals, assisting at surgery, daily orders, progress notes, monitoring lab values, radiologic and diagnostic studies, and attending conferences. This is an exceptional opportunity that is one of the highlights of the year. Also, the resident will rotate to the Jersey Shore Regional Trauma Center for two months and learn the fundamentals of resuscitation in blunt and penetrating trauma and orthopaedic injuries in adult and pediatric patients. He/she will participate in definitive trauma management, understand intensive care, diagnostic testing and treatment, and present cases on daily rounds.

PGY2 residents will begin to recognize that there are different successful ways to perform an operation. They begin to make choices of preferred style or approach. The resident will continue to assist at surgery and perform ED cases requiring suturing, incision and drainage. There will be chances to be the operating surgeon (with assistance from the chief resident or attending surgeon), on hernia, rectal, appendix, laparoscopic cholecystectomy and breast procedures.

Quality patient care at its highest level is an amalgam of virtues. These include intellectual curiosity stimulated through honest, careful analysis of basic and clinical scientific investigations, judgments developed from experience, moral responsibility derived from the human intimacy of our profession, and equanimity.