Hey guys (and gals). Just wanted to post some info on my program in case any of you are considering St. Louis as a residency destination.
I'm an intern at St. Louis University in Ortho and I have a pretty good handle on what the program is like by now so here it is in my honest opinion.
City: St. Louis is a great place to live. Very affordable, great sports town, 4 seasons, has an airport that's a hub and easy to get in and out of, nice people. I moved here from Dallas and I'm much happier with this town even though I'm a southerner by birth.
Hospital: sort of an interesting mix of what you normally see in county/city hospitals and private hospitals. SLUH is owned by Tenet, a big private hospital corporation so the facilities are pretty nice and the ancillary staff is decent (better than county hospitals). Still a shortage of nurses but you get that everywhere these days. St. Louis has no city hospital as of a few years ago so all the hospitals share the indigent care and get reimbursed by the governments responsible for the indigents. There are 3 level one trauma centers in St. Louis (SLUH, Wash U, and St. John's). Wash U and SLUH share most of the trauma because St. John's is pretty far out west of the main city. SLUH is the only hospital in St. Louis that has contracts with Illinois so we get all the trauma from across the river (lots of violence over there apparently). The ER kinda sucks, but that doesn't really affect you much except when you are an intern. There is excellent rapport with the general surgery services, so that has been nice.
Program:
PGY-1: you rotate on gen surgery services for 5-6 months, ER one month, Ortho 3 months, Pedi surg one month, Plastics one month, and another elective one month (mine is ENT for some reason). We are moving to make the intern year more appropriate with anesthesia and perhaps radiology coming, but not sure if that will happen. Call is mostly q4 on gen surg, you'll have 2-3 months q3 on Pedi and VA. Ortho call as intern is once a week with a senior at SLUH and you cover a small private hospital from home at night but only come in for cases. Second year is 4 months trauma which is pretty tough, 9 calls per month. Sleep is variable on call. Some nights you won't sit down, others you'll get a few hours rest. Then you have 4 months of Pedi ortho and 4 months at above mentioned private hospital. You take trauma or pedi call 9 times per month (q3.5). As you get more senior, your call gets less and less frequent. As chief it is all home call for 8 months then none for 4 months. There is a ton of autonomy for the ortho residents, with the senior usually taking the junior resident through cases with staff input being commensurate with the difficulty of the case. The staff is pretty small right now, with no hand surgeons except a plastics attending. The spine attending is awesome and we are actively recruiting a second spine guy. Ditto on hand staff. Our current chairman is retiring in March and his replacement is a huge trauma name from Detroit. I am told there are at least 2 other new attendings on the way as well. There is a sports/foot rotation as a pgy4 that is done with an private attending. Pedi experience is excellent with great staff members over at that hospital. The incoming chairman met with us and talked about the coming 80 work week. He acknowledges, as everyone should in my opinion, that compliance with that policy will soon be a necessity for continued existence. He expressed his sincere desire to try and make that a reality without sacrificing our operative experience. We will see how successful we are in that endeavor in the coming years. Obviously we will probably have some changes in our call etc. if we are to get down around 80 hours.
Overall I am very happy with the program I matched at. On match day I must admit that I wasn't thrilled with my result, mainly because I simply didn't know much about the program or the city until I got here. We have a great group of residents that hang out together frequently, our program churns out good surgeons, graduates get good fellowships (one got Indiana hand last year which I here is a top fellowship), we operate a ton, and the workload is large but manageable. If you are interested in the midwest then I urge you to look at our program.
Best of luck to all of you. This is a very exciting and anxiety filled time for you. It will all be over in a few months and then the real fun will begin.
