From Robert W. Block, MD, Professor and Daniel C. Plunket Chair, Pediatrics

Welcome to the Department of Pediatrics at OU-Tulsa. We hope you are able to spend a little time browsing this website to learn about our pediatric residency program.

Our residency is strongly oriented toward the expert clinical practice of pediatrics, encompassing both general and subspecialty pediatric medicine. Our faculty is composed of academic pediatric generalists, subspecialists, and other health professionals in allied health fields and research. Resident education includes the standard mix of inpatient and outpatient rotation sites: our pediatric clinic, pediatric wards, subspecialists' offices, the emergency department, and the pediatric and neonatal intensive care units. In addition, residents may elect experience in our community. Learning occurs during daily bedside rounds, clinic morning conferences, inpatient morning report, our weekly Academic Afternoon, biweekly board review sessions, and the all-important committment to individual study.

In 2007, our general pediatric clinic moved into a new 100,000 square foot ambulatory care center on our main campus, optimizing our ability to educate residents while providing excellent care for children and their families. Our out-patient clinic is the location for 35-40,000 patient visits per year. Residents in our program rotate at the Children's Justice Center, which was completed in 1992 and serves as a nationally recognized center for the multidisciplinary approach to the evaluation of child abuse cases. About 900 children per year visit the Justice Center for medical assessments by our subspecialty faculty and fellows.

In 2008 our primary inpatient teaching facility, Saint Francis Hospital, opened a new, free- standing Children's Hospital . It is expected that the number of pediatric patients will increase significantly from the 6,700 children treated this past fiscal year. The hospital has developed a new Pediatric Emergency Center which creates an optimal learning opportunity in Pediatric Emergency Medicine.

As a measure of our success, the Pediatric Residency Program has remained fully accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) with no major citations since our inception in 1975. Traditionally, about 75% of our resident graduates enter primary care pediatric practice, with the remainder successfully competing for subspecialty fellowships. A list of the career choices of recent graduates is available here.

Under the direction of Deborah Lowen, MD, our pediatric residency program is strong and entering an exciting period of change. The move to new facilities will improve inpatient and outpatient work environments. Use of information technology will continue to advance from current free access to MD Consult and Up-To-Date, remote access to inpatient records, and use of a resident duty hours web log to the implementation of our ambulatory clinic electronic health record.

The combined internal medicine/pediatrics program is strong under the leadership of Brian Yount, MD. He plays an integral role in the program as a skilled pediatric hospitalist.

Thanks for browsing through our pages. I hope you can see that we are a friendly, fun, and supportive program with a diverse group of residents and faculty. The fact that we are located in a beautiful, safe, inexpensive, and convenient city is an added bonus.