Fellows consistently rate the clinical experience and the willingness of our faculty to teach as the two best strengths of our program. The Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix ICU and the Pulmonary Institute at Banner attract a wide variety of the sickest patients. Graduates of our program are all excellent bedside physicians. But our growing clinical research programs at Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix and the Phoenix VA Medical Center also offer opportunities for our fellows to become clinical scholars — able to carry out and interpret clinical research that impacts patient outcomes. Fellows have approximately six months of protected time for research, and current active areas of fellow research include optimizing anticoagulation regimens used during ECMO, treatment of pulmonary hypertension, development of EMR-based clinical decision support and use of interleukin-1 antagonists in patients with sepsis, among others.
The fellowship provides travel expenses to annual national conferences to present abstracts and provides support for board review class. Most of the fellows and core faculty travel to the national ATS conference annually to present research. The fellowship is also sponsoring an annual Simulation-based Critical Care conference (in collaboration with our colleagues from the Pulmonary Critical Care fellowship at Banner – University Medical Center Tucson) in which the fellows will participate as junior simulation faculty.