Pediatric Critical Care Clinical Experience

Our clinical experience is centered in at Primary Children's Hospital (PCH). Primary Children's is modern 270-bed facility run by Intermountain Healthcare with a close affiliation to the University of Utah.

PCH is the only pediatric hospital in the Intermountain West, serving five states and over 10 percent of the continental land mass of the U.S.

The Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) is a 28-bed unit. The Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) is an 18-bed unit. During surge times, the PICU and CICU expand as needed to meet clinical need.

Our patient population is large and diverse and our fellowship exposes fellows to the full gamut of pediatric illnesses and therapies. Fellows also have strong subspecialty support from both medical and surgical subspecialties.

Fellows gain experience by managing patients who require:

• ECMO
• Ventricular Assist Devices
• Continuous renal replacement therapies
• High frequency ventilation

Procedural experience is vast. Fellows learn skills through task training and dedicated skills training in the operating room with anesthesiology.   Fellows perform the majority of ICU procedures.

Clinical Service

Day Service:

Fellows work on one of three services during the day.

• PICU Red—Fellows lead the resident team with supervision from a faculty member.
• PICU White—Senior fellows lead team of PICU patients with indirect faculty supervision. (Pre-Attending)
• CICU—Fellows are the primary providers for their CICU patients. The CICU team also includes a critical care faculty member and nurse practitioner.

Night Service

Each night, a fellow leads the PICU, and a second fellow runs the CICU. With 24 hour in-house attending presence, we focus clinical training on educational goals rather than staffing requirements.

Elective Rotations

Elective clinical rotations include the University of Utah Burn Unit and the Intermountain Medical Center Shock Trauma Unit among others.

Clinical Schedule

Fellows’ clinical service is typically scheduled in one-week blocks; weeks are split between dedicated day or night service. When fellows are not completing clinical duty, they work full-time on their scholarly activities. Scholarly activity time for fellows is call-free, allowing for intense development of research and academic skills. Fellows may request additional clinical time as part of their individualized learning plan. We fully adhere to the ACGME duty hour requirements.

Clinical time is distributed across all three years, slightly weighted towards the first year of fellowship. This allows for early scholarly activity and graduated clinical autonomy during the fellowship.

Typical Schedule

First Year

Second Year

Third Year