Clinical Rotations

The hospital services are based out of Ascension St. John and is strictly a consultative service. The hospital team consists of an attending physician, fellow and 1-2 internal medicine and/or family medicine residents. We may occasionally have a medical student on the rotation. The faculty round daily with the team providing management oversight plus focused time for education.

The patients on the hospital service include several ICU consults, transplant patients, complex fluid and electrolyte disorder patients, glomerular diseases and few end stage renal disease patients. The census on the service usually varies between 18-25 patients.

Fellows become competent in all modalities of renal replacement therapy including continuous renal replacement therapy, hemodialysis, and peritoneal dialysis.

Fellows rotate at Ascension St. John Transplant Center for a period of 4 months during their fellowship. The transplant center performs over 50 kidney transplants. The faculty includes two transplant certified nephrologists.

The fellow learns the indications and complications of transplantation, the principles of histocompatibility testing, and the psychosocial evaluation and impact of transplantation. The fellow will additionally participate in multidisciplinary selection committee and understand the process of assessing suitability for living and deceased donor transplantation. They will acquire knowledge of the pharmacology of immunosuppressive drug regimens and complications of such, workup, and management of allograft dysfunction (including cellular and antibody-mediated rejection), recurrence of primary disease, and care of the post-operative.

The fellow spends ½ day per week in a longitudinal continuity clinic. The fellow is scheduled 1-2 new patients and 6-7 return patients in clinic. Hospitalized patients seen on the nephrology service follow up in the fellow clinic to maintain continuity of care. The fellow will become adept at managing CKD, hypertension, glomerulonephritis, stones, cardio-renal, nephro-oncology and long-term post-transplant patients (kidney and non-renal solid organ transplant). The ambulatory clinic is located at the Kidney Care Oklahoma Offices.

During the transplant rotation, fellows will attend 4 additional clinics per week. These include the pre-transplant, post-transplant clinic as well as donor evaluation clinics.

Fellows have 3-4 months of elective rotations. Electives offered are interventional radiology, pathology, urology, research, and vascular surgery.