This year marks 10 years of the Yale Orthopaedic Trauma Fellowship, a one-year fellowship that focuses on teaching an in-depth knowledge, patient care skills, and surgical expertise in the field of orthopaedic trauma.
The program allows fellows to operate alongside world-renowned, fellowship-trained, orthopaedic traumatologists. Each faculty member in the division has diverse sub-interests within trauma, which provides fellows with a wide exposure to advanced practices, from treating patients with open fractures or mangled limbs to those who require arthroplasty of the shoulder, hip, and knee.
"We're very proud of our faculty," said Brad Yoo, professor of orthopaedics and rehabilitation at Yale School of Medicine and the trauma fellowship director. "We all have the same goals in terms of excellent, high-quality patient care, but we've all had different educational backgrounds. So, we approach the same problem with a slightly different lens. We find that that's a very important thing for the fellow to experience because then they can see how the same goal is being accomplished in multiple different ways."
Fellows can participate in the program after they complete their medical residency. The fellowship is designed to provide them with the training and skills they will need in their future practice. One fellow is selected per year, and they often go on to work to work in academia when the fellowship ends.
"That's particularly gratifying for us because with the knowledge that we're able to imbue upon these trainees, they go on and then they basically do the same thing with a whole new cohort of people," Yoo said. "You can see how the reach of Yale can become exponential over a period of time because we're training the trainers."
Past fellows include Lauren Stimson, an orthopedic surgeon who is now at Texas Tech University; Sarah Rizzo, who is at the University of Rochester; Alim Ramji, now co-director of Orthopedic Trauma at St. Vincent's Medical Center in Bridgeport, Connecticut; Motasem Salameh, now an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at YSM; Shady Mahmoud, an orthopedic upper extremity and trauma surgeon in Qatar; and Lee Yaari, a senior orthopedic surgeon who is now at Rabin Medical Center in Israel and Tel Aviv University.
In an interview, Yoo discusses how the fellowship got started, what it offers, and what orthopedic trauma looks like in practice.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did Yale decide to create this fellowship?
Brad Yoo: The trauma fellowship is meant to complement the existing programs of residency training. We specialize in complex trauma at our facility, and not every resident really gets a very broad exposure to that skill set required to take care of these types of patients. So we found a need for a fellowship like this. This was about two years before I came to Yale. Most academic facilities have training programs like fellowships. It's an attribute of a healthy orthopedic program that is academically inclined, and so it's almost a natural evolution for Yale to incorporate fellows into their training program.
What does the term 'orthopedic trauma' mean? What does it entail?
Yoo: It's a very broad scope that we cover. It's all age groups, from infancy to extreme geriatric. We take care of any trauma to the musculoskeletal system, with the exception of the spine. For example, any traumatic injury to the bone. However, we also take care of traumatic injuries to soft tissue, ligaments, and tendons. That's what orthopedic trauma is. It could result from someone falling off of a chair, a running or sporting injury, falling off a roof, or even getting in a head-on collision at 100 miles an hour. We take care of that whole spectrum of injuries.
What does the program include? What does the training look like?
Yoo: The fellow shows up. We identify their needs. They work like an attending [physician]. They perform surgeries alongside an attending surgeon and in an apprenticeship model. They see patients in a clinic, and then they use some of their leadership skills that they developed in their residency to help educate and guide the residents. So, Yale residents are being mentored by the fellow as well.
Where do the fellows go after the fellowship ends?
Yoo: It all depends upon the preference. Some of our earlier international faculty fellows returned to their home countries. But in general, most people that do our program come to be educators or academic surgeons. We try to find them jobs through our own networking ability, and we've been quite successful over the years.
