Cleveland Clinic

ok I'll try my best here. CCF is a very academic place. They are very interested in training academic surgeons since Iannotti too over ~ 9 years ago. Their residents seem to get top fellowships(Rush joints, Rush shoulder/sports, National Hand Center at Union Memorial, there's a list on their website). As far as the program itself there are ~70 staff members, they all seem pretty chill and seem to like to teach. There is a night float system that makes the lifestyle easier on the residents. They spend a few months each year at Metro (Local hospital and Level 1 Trauma) since there is not much trauma that comes into CCF. This is looked at as either an advantage or disadvantage depending upon the person.

CCF as a hospital is very surgeon dominated, so many patients are admitted to medicine floors for "babysitting" until surgery and then followed by medicine post-op except for their surgical complaints (not sure how this is elsewhere). The facilities are top notch with beautiful buildings and very nice satellite surgical centers in the suburbs where a lot of the ortho is done. There is a brand new Sports Health Center that has a combination of clinic, a surgery center, and I believe research facilities as well.

The sports dept is very strong(with Bergfeld, Parker, Miniaci and Andrish among others), as well as joints and shoulder (Iannotti). The spine center is a combination of ortho and neuro and has Dr Benzel (world famous neuro spine guy). They do all of the sports medicine for the professional sports teams in Cleveland as well as many of the colleges and high schools. The research is top notch from hardcore basic science (Apte, Hascall, etc) to more translational (Derwin, Muschler) to the clinical research center, which has developed a great databasing system over the last 5 years or so, which should facilitate a lot of good clinical papers in the near future. I think half of the positions are 6 year spots.

Residents from what I have been told get to operate quite a bit due to the enormous volume that they do, there's enough cases to go around.

The biggest downside probably being that the program is in Cleveland, which isn't the greatest city and the sky is gray from ~ November until March. That being said it is affordable and there is enough to do, lots of sports, good museums, a very nice metro park system, and plenty of restaurants and bars to go around.

Hope this helps.

The program is a 5 year program, with an optional research year only if the resident is interested in pursuing it. The research year is NOT mandatory.

I'd like to clear up a few things.

1st - Cleveland is gray from October thru April (I grew up there so I can joke about this).

2nd - Cleveland is a good city to spend 5 years in training. There's lots to do, you just have to look for it.

3rd - The CCF guys only go to the Metro (the trauma place) as PGY-2's and PGY-4's for their Ortho.

4th - They do take care of all the pro teams, but that's not of consequence to residents as they are not involved in said coverage.

I trained at Case Western Reserve University and then did my fellowship at the CCF in sports so I can say that I know both programs very well. Both programs are exeptional places to train. Cleveland has a very rich orthopaedic tradition. Like Case, the CCF has a who's who of Orthopaedics on its staff. The residents are trained very well. They have a solid representation of attendings across all subspecialties. The residents can basically hand pick their fellowships. . . . . . .no matter what they want to do. And I know a lot of the residents there, and they are all fairly down to earth, good people.

What are the differences between CCF and Case? In terms of strengths/weaknesses?

Further clarification:

CCF residents go to Metro for Ortho Trauma for 2 months as a PGY2 and PGY3.

While it's definitely not a trauma heavy program, there is also a good deal of trauma exposure during other rotations and in on call cases.