Residents making rounds in the PICU.
Children's Hospital Oakland
Residency Program
educational settings
Hospital and Clinics
Education is a constant activity in all settings at Children's Hospital. Teaching occurs at the bedside, in the examining room, on rounds, and in formal lectures, case conferences and seminars.
Our full-time faculty, community pediatricians, visiting professors, nursing educators, as well as members of ancillary departments and the residents themselves, provide a rich educational environment.
Most residency training is physically based at Children's Hospital. There is a consistency of teaching, and a community spirit not found in programs where residents train in several isolated locations.
Residents develop lasting relationships with other house staff, with hospital-based and community attendings, and with general hospital employees, ranging from nurses and respiratory therapists, to administration staff. A sense of being colleagues, not teachers and students, develops between residents and attendings, as they spend years working side by side.
Learning pediatric medicine in a hospital designed especially for children has great advantages. Unlike the pediatric floor of a large multi-use hospital, our entire building has been designed for children. All our employees have a devotion to and expertise in the care of pediatric patients.
While almost all of the residency training takes place at Children's Hospital, residents do spend time in other settings for specific clinical rotations. For example, to ensure adequate training with deliveries and neonatal medicine, our residents spend time at the active labor and delivery services and nurseries of Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley and Kaiser Oakland.
Many residents also choose to spend elective time in other academic institutions around the nation, and sometimes in other countries.
Community and Advocacy Program (CAP rotations)
Under the supervision of Primary Care faculty, residents visit over 20 community sites during their Community, Advocacy and Primary Care (CAP) rotations. The CAP rotations are dedicated to teaching future pediatricians their role in their community, and how to appropriately advocate for the rights, safety, health and education of children and their families.
In addition to visiting children in homeless shelters, drug rehab facilities, juvenile hall and hospice, the residents also have an opportunity to bring their preventative healthcare knowledge with them when they visit preschools, residential schools, WIC and patient’s homes. Collaboration with the Oakland community and the many organizations that serve children expose residents to the world outside the hospital and teach them how to become leaders in their communities. By the end of the CAP rotation, residents are prepared to collaborate with their representatives and community leaders to effect social change.
Research Institute
Pediatric residents at Children's Hospital Oakland benefit greatly from the educational and research opportunities at the hospital's research institute.
Children’s Hospital's research institute is one of the nation’s top 12 pediatric research centers in terms of National Institutes of Health grant funding.
Children's is proud to be the only non-university-affiliated pediatric medical center in the United States to have a research institute of this magnitude, with a yearly institute budget of more than $47 million. The institute has its own state-of-the-art facility only a few blocks from the main hospital.
The institute’s desire to educate future researchers also helps Children's fellows in hematology/oncology, infectious diseases, critical care medicine, and emergency medicine; post-doctoral fellows in hematology, immunology and stem cell biology; medical students; and NIH-funded minority students from colleges and high schools.
Residents seeking careers in biomedical and behavioral research can spend elective time developing projects at the research institute. Attending noon research conferences and research seminars can help residents stay abreast of scientific advances throughout their residency.
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