Rotations

UMass Chan Medical School works closely with our clinical partner, UMass Memorial Health Care, to provide neurology residents with first-line exposure to assess, diagnose and manage cases with the supervision from our faculty.   

UMass Memorial Medical Center is the only tertiary academic medical center and level 1 trauma center in Central Massachusetts. UMass Memorial is also the only certified comprehensive stroke center with American Heart Association/ASA Gold-Plus awards and a world-class interventional neuroradiology staff that provides comprehensive stroke care in Central Massachusetts. Numerous hospitals subscribe to UMass Memorial’s Telestroke and Teleneurology services that provides acute neurological assessment and management to outside hospital emergency rooms and several intensive care units. This network of hospitals provides a steady supply of interesting clinical cases with acute neurological problems that come to our hospital. Our broad catchment area ensures that residents are exposed to a diverse patient population with varying socioeconomic, cultural and racial backgrounds. 

UMass Memorial also has a closed neurological trauma intensive care unit with full-time fellowship trained neurointensivists who provide the primary medical management of all neurosurgical, neurovascular, critically ill neurological and neurotrauma patients that neurology residents experience first-hand during their neurocritical care rotation. 

We have 24/7 EEG and continuous EEG monitoring capability and our epilepsy monitoring unit and new epilepsy surgery program provide exposure to complex and surgical epilepsy patients and daily EMU teaching rounds with our expert epilepsy neurologists. 

Our residency program also provides excellent outpatient clinical exposure to general neurology patients and subspecialty clinics in epilepsy, movement disorders, neuromuscular, ALS, dementia/TBI/neuro-psychiatry, stroke and neuroimmunology/multiple sclerosis clinic.  Residents will have new patient exposure as well as their own personal continuity clinic patients that will be seen and precepted by select excellent general and subspecialty neurology faculty that are gifted and dedicated teachers. 

The 36-month training program includes inpatient stroke, wards and consult services, mandatory EEG, EMG and neuro ICU rotations, a community neurohospitalist rotation at the nearby UMass Memorial campus and continuity and sub-specialty clinics. Click here for sample block schedule.

One of the special aspects of our program is the opportunity to individualize your training program due to the generous number of elective blocks and flexibility that they can be utilized.  Elective blocks are offered as early as PGY2 year and there are many in-house electives available including epilepsy, movement disorders, neuromuscular, neuropathology, diagnostic and interventional neuroradiology, neurosurgery, neurorehabilitation, trauma and unique exposures, for example with the multidisciplinary ALS clinic and global neurology.  Click here for electives.

We are one of the few neurology residency programs that have adopted the X+Y block system or burst block schedule system where rotations are separated into pure inpatient and pure outpatient with no crossover allowing residents to get the most out of their inpatient and clinic rotations.  This system has been implemented by numerous internal medicine residency programs and been found to reduce conflicts between inpatient and outpatient responsibilities, decrease fragmentation of patient care, enhance the educational experience and increase satisfaction of residents with their training.