If you are a resident looking for a nephrology fellowship take a moment to consider St John. We are a small nephrology fellowship that values hand-crafted nephrology education. Ascension St John hospital is a 714 bed hospital that is literally on the border of Detroit and Grosse Pointe. Yes, that Grosse Pointe.
This provides us a steady stream of patients with diverse backgrounds. St John operates a busy ER with a healthy mix of trauma. We get people from the upper socioeconomic classes and their unique presentations and diseases. Importantly, especially for a community program, St John is big enough to offer all the services:
- ECMO
- CRRT
- Plasma exchange
- Red and white cell pheresis
- Acute PD
- Kidney transplant
We still do our own biopsies. We have our own interventional nephrology suite, where we place tunneled venous catheter, provide fistulagrams, and do access angioplasty for our hemodialysis patients.
But the most important part of our fellowship is that we are not a rough and tough, traditional, malignant program. We take a gentler, kinder approach to medical education. Over the last few years we have decoupled our reliance on fellows to do the work of nephrology. It wasn’t trivial and it required buy in from the entire staff but we realize that treating fellows as worker mules was not good for their education. This uncoupling means fellows will be busy, experience requires being busy, but we don’t let our fellows get overwhelmed by the work. Our program takes fellows by the hand and guide them through a bespoke education track to provide them with a top notch nephrology education. Regardless of how unsteady or unsure you are about your kidney knowledge, we will turn you into a first rate nephrologist. That’s our promise.
So if you have finished your interviews but still haven’t found the program that feels like home, check us out.