Conferences

There are a ton of conferences on this rotation. In pre-op conference, we review the patients who are getting elective surgeries to ensure that all the necessary laboratory work has been done. Two weekly noon conferences cover pertinent surgical issues such as ventilator management or work-up of gallbladder disease. There are several multidisciplinary conferences; in particular, in tumor board, we discuss the management of cancer patients with radiation oncology and medical oncology and in chest conference, mystery cases involving thoracic symptoms are presented. These are quite fun since they cross many different organ systems and disciplines. On Fridays, we have grand rounds where the entire department gathers for an often specialized talk, on CT scans or peripheral IVs or oral surgery for example. This is followed by morbidity and mortality (M&M), where all the services present the operations that happened that week and any complications involving those operations. Often, we will discuss in depth a surgery that had a complication to better understand why it happened so that we can avoid it, detect it earlier, or treat it better in the future. So there's a lot going on, though not much is aimed at medical students.