Residency Departments
Primary Care Pediatrics
UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland is a major primary care resource for a large, diverse urban population, allowing each resident to gain an extensive experience in primary care pediatrics. The Primary Care Division includes a full-time physician director and eighteen attendings with special interests and training.
Resident involvement consists of both month-long rotations and weekly continuity clinics both of which represent important parts of the curriculum.
In addition to their continuity clinic, on average, residents spend about 4-6 weeks per year on rotations in primary care pediatrics. This comprehensive experience includes three main areas: community, advocacy and primary care (CAP).
Community Advocacy and Primary Care (CAP)
Vision: To prepare future pediatricians to be community champions committed to achieving health equity in partnership with children and their families.
Purpose: Using an equity framework, the goal of this rotation is to train medical residents to become superlative pediatricians. This rotation emphasizes the broader social, structural, and cultural influences that impact children's physical health. Residents learn how to implement partnerships with the community to delivery authentically comprehensive care in the following 6 areas:
- Development
- Environmental Health
- Immigrant Health
- Mental Health
- Nutrition
- Pain Evaluation and Management
Similarly, pediatric residents build skills in the following 5 core values:
- Advocacy
- Community Engagement
- Cultural Humility
- Health Equity
- Medical Excellence
Program Learning Objectives:
- Learn how to dialogue about health and wellness in a culturally responsive way to adults and children
- Learn best practices in outpatient medicine, including building skills in health promotion and treating patients with complex care needs
- Learn how to advocate for children's health at the local, state and federal level including understanding the legislative process and the pediatrician's role in policy-making.
- Learn how to collaborate and consult with community partners serving children
- Understand the link between the environment and children's health
Residents have been instrumental in developing the Community Outreach and Advocacy Program, and under the supervision of Primary Care faculty, they serve the most under-resourced children in our community, visiting over 50 community sites during the CAP rotation. This broad exposure to community partners helps residents see the importance of collaborating with other partners and aligns with our emphasis on an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to care. In these settings, residents experience firsthand the benefit of working collaboratively with a multidisciplinary team.
The advocacy curriculum's goal is to familiarize residents with their role as advocates to promote health equity for children and families. By the end of the CAP rotation, residents are prepared to collaborate with elective representatives and community leaders to effect social change.
During the CAP rotation, residents take care of both their own continuity patients and patients in the division's special primary care clinics including:
- Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center
- BLOOM: Black Baby Equity Clinic
- Chasing Healthy Outcomes
- Down Syndrome
- Encore Medical (Housing Instability Support)
- Foster Care
- Human Rights/Pediatric Asylum
- Integrative Medicine
- International/Immigrant Health
- Resilience/ACES
- Teen Clinic
- School-based Health Centers
Continuity clinics are composed of a group of PGY-1's, PGY-2's, and PGY-3's, supervised by the same primary care attendings throughout the year. Each resident's weekly continuity clinic is "protected" time, free from other clinical responsibilities, so each resident can develop a panel of personal patients for whom that resident is the main provider of care during residency.
Elective rotations in private offices, other urban clinics such as La Clinica de la Raza or Asian Health Services, and rural areas of California, are also available at the PGY-2 and PGY-3 level.
The Primary Care Division has started several innovative programs including Family Information and Navigation Desk (FIND), Staying Healthy in Nature Everyday (SHINE), Resilience Clinic and the Pediatric Asylum Clinic (one of the few Pediatric specific Human Rights Clinics in the country). The clinic houses the Reach Out and Read Literacy Program, encouraging parents to read to their children (in part by giving free children's books to clinic families). In addition, there is a child safety program that provides free education, car seats and bicycle helmets and a Medical-Legal Partnership where families have access to pro-bono legal services. Our Food Pharmacy Program works in partnership with the Alameda County Food Bank providing food for families on site several times a month.
Emergency Medicine
With the largest Pediatric Emergency Medicine Division in Northern California and the busiest facility for pediatric emergencies, Children's provides an outstanding educational opportunity for residents.
Our Emergency Department has almost 35,000 visits per year. As an ACS nationally designated Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center, BCH Oakland is the pediatric emergency and acute care hospital for Alameda County. We also have a helicopter-landing site for transporting critical pediatric transfers from outlying areas. Each year, approximately 6,000 admissions come through our Emergency Department, often without a prior diagnosis allowing trainees to participate in the primary workup.
The department is staffed by a team of board-certified physicians in Pediatric Emergency Medicine. They provide 24-hour in-house coverage and supervision of residents and medical students assigned to the department.
Generalist Inpatient
Our hospital provides inpatient care to approximately 9,000 patients a year.
Our intensive care unit is an outstanding educational experience for residents where they gain exposure to the most common pediatric critical care problems, such as meningitis, septic shock, acute respiratory failure, and head trauma, as well as exposure to post-op cardiac surgery patients, and a mix of rare diseases. With an experienced pediatric critical care attending in the ICU 24 hours a day, this is a superb setting for generalist training.
Our general inpatient wards also offer a robust educational experience for the generalist, with a mix of both common pediatric illnesses (asthma, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, dehydration) as well as rare diagnostic dilemmas and subspecialty cases.
There are three general ward teams, each with a unique mix of learners from third year medical students to Hospital Medicine fellows. Interns and residents rotate through each of these teams and receive outstanding teaching from the hospitalists, subspecialists and chief residents on service.
Subspecialty Divisions
In the course of training, residents gain exposure to our broad group of subspecialists — on inpatient rotations and on elective rotations, which include outpatient specialty clinics.
In addition to our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and Pediatric Critical Care Unit, we have three inpatient ward subspecialty units, two in Hematology/Oncology and one in Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine, on which our residents gain a comprehensive experience in those specialties.
Browse the outpatient clinics at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland, all of which are available to our residents as educational opportunities: Pediatric Clinics & Services
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