WEST FLORIDA

USF Health

By Mikhail Marchenko, MD, PGY-3

Greeting from Tampa and the USF Emergency Medicine Residency! The last few months have been quite busy and exciting for our residency program. Our new interns have started their orientation month and are awesome. We are excited to see how much they will grow as emergency medicine physicians over the next few years!

We congratulate our graduates and are happy to have two of them working alongside our residents: Dr. Alicia Nassar is now our EMS fellow and Dr. Megan Tyler for staying at Tampa General Hospital as an attending. For all the 2020 graduates, represent us well in Florida and beyond; we are proud of you and miss you already!

Despite having to adjust our education in the setting of COVID-19, our seniors and residents have been exceptional at running grand rounds online from home. Many awesome presentations and great learning has happened in the last several months. We are glad to be making steps into integrating safe group and simulations this summer.

We are proud of our seniors Dr. Nicole Abdo and Dr. Lauren Shapiro for representing emergency medicine and getting involved in leadership roles at USF by serving on the Resident Advisory Committee.

We look forward to what this summer brings. In the words of our EMRAF President, Dr. Matthew Beattie: “Stay up to date and learn every day, but place your health and happiness first.” ■ the Brandon Regional Hospital Re

Brandon Regional Hospital

By Rashmi Jadhav, MD, PGY-3

What a time to be in emergency medicine!

Our program, like many others, has been adjusting daily with the evolving pandemic. I am proud to say that our residents have shown great leadership, a strong work ethic, and a true sense of responsibility as we all face this global health crisis. Everyone is working harder than ever to keep up with the healthcare demand, and we realized that we are fortunate to be training during this time and gaining a unique educational experience, which we will carry with us throughout our careers. Through these trying times, all of our attending physicians have been incredible in providing support both clinically and on the educational front. Our PD ously to ensure our education and clinical training remains unaffected, and we are incredibly thankful for their efforts.

Over the last few months, we have had several scholarly achievements by our residents. Drs. Kushwaha, Bacci, Au, Mcclure and Hsu published various case reports to the Cureus Journal. We also had several residents — including Dr. Jadhav, Rivera,

Al-Marzoog, Glickman, Shepherd and Kushwaha—present their research at and APDs have been working vigor

search Day in May. They have put in a significant amount of work and effort into their scholarly activities, and the program continues to proudly support them.

Additionally, our program is proud to announce our very first Chief Residents for the 2020-2021 academic year. Drs. Melissa Bacci, Rachel Oliver and myself are very excited to take on our new roles and help to grow and improve our amazing program even further. Additionally, we have several new faculty members joining our cohort who will bring immense value and experience to the ED and its residents.

Lastly, we are incredibly excited to have our incoming interns begin the new academic year. Our program is finally complete with a full cohort of PGY-1, PGY-2 and PGY-3 residents. Although we have transitioned all academics and our boot camp to a virtual platform, we have several innovative ideas to make this experience meaningful to our interns. We look forward to a strong start to the new academic year! ■

HUMAN TRAFFICKING & EMERGENCY MEDICINE

Meets new HB 851 requirement Approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™

FSU at Sarasota Memorial

By Courtney Kirkland, DO, PGY-2

Greetings from Sarasota! We are extremely excited to welcome our second class to the FSU family. They had orientation during the last week of June and started in July with all of their certifications. We have also had the privilege of welcoming another new member to our FSU family: resident Dr. Kevin Raymond and his wife, Laurel Raymond, gave birth to their third child, Emma Grace, in May.

We have continued to make a name for ourselves at Sarasota Memorial Healthcare System. Julio Arrieta and Dr. Darrell Ray, one of our residents, recently published a study on the

Oak Hill Hospital

After much anticipation, our residency is finally at full capacity. It has been amazing to see our program grow to a full complement of residents and core faculty. As with any change, there is an initial resistance; however, now the ED staff sees us as an integral part of the team. Now that we have third-year residents, it is exciting to introduce our first Chief Residents, Drs. Corey Cole and Christopher Megargel. Our new vice chiefs, Drs. Arun Malhotra and Juan-Diego Rodriguez, have also been chosen from the junior class. The residents have been adjusting well to having a full complement with the seniors taking on a supervisory role, managing the juniors and our first 30 patients at our hospital with COVID-19. Another one of our residents, Dr. Tom Cox, will be partnering with our emergency department pharmacists for an innovative study on phenobarbital used in alcohol withdrawal.

Unfortunately, with social distancing measures in place, we have been unable to have many group activities in person, and many events have been canceled. Our residents and faculty have adjusted to the changes without much resistance, as would be expected in true emergency medicine fashion. We have been very lucky newest interns, and the interns adjusting to life in residency. The ED seems to be recovering after a brief reprieve from the COVID-19 pandemic keeping most people home. We anticipate a busy snow bird season and will use the slower months to get the interns ready for the “in-season” volume. As things start back up, the construction on the new ED will be resuming soon. Though having parts of the ED shut down will create some challenges, the expansion will bring much needed space. Recently, some of our residents participated in the HCA Poster Presentation Competition and their with PPE at our hospital, including being provided with P100 respirators by our faculty for which we are incredibly grateful.

We are looking forward to growing as a program with our second class of residents. While we were hoping the COVID crisis would settle down, we are prepared for anything now that cases in Florida seem to be growing significantly. I think I speak for everyone in my class when I say that we have come so far from the beginning of our intern year. It has

By Jonathan Yaghoubian, DO, MS, & Corey Cole, DO, PGY-3s

definitely been one to remember. ■

posters will be published in the HCA Scholarly Commons. Due to the pandemic, they were not able to present in person but look forward to having the opportunity another year. Many conferences as of late have been cancelled or changed to virtual only. Hopefully in the near future, these events will resume, allowing our residents to participate at the national level and build their networking.

With under a year left until graduation, our seniors will be the first graduating class of the program. Some are getting ready for fellowship interview season while others are being interviewed for attending positions at emergency departments across the nation. ■