Danbury Hospital To Train Next Generation of Surgeons

Danbury Hospital had been participating as an integrated site with a surgical residency program based at Sound Shore Medical Center. Dr. Saldinger and the Department of Surgery developed plans for a de- novo residency program over the course of the past 12 months. Application was made to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), which is the organization responsible for the accreditation of all graduate medical education programs in the United States.

A representative performed a site visit at Danbury in order to verify the documentation and to confirm that Danbury Hospital has the infrastructure and resources necessary to train safe, competent general surgeons. This past February, the ACGME sent Danbury Hospital formal notification of program accreditation; the new program is scheduled to be reviewed again in 2012.

The Danbury Hospital program is the first new general surgery residency program in Connecticut since 1969. Approval recognizes the financial soundness of Danbury Hospital and the growing shortage of general surgeons. A general surgery training program is considered a core program by the ACGME, and is a prerequisite for development of other hospital-based training programs such as Pulmonary Medicine and Critical Care Medicine.

Educating high-quality medical students and general surgery residents in the Danbury community not only contributes nationally to improving health care delivery, but guarantees a pipeline to develop premier surgeons for our own community into the future.

The structure of the program is as follows: each year, five medical school graduates will join the general surgery residency program. Three of those will plan to stay throughout the training, and two will stay for one year. The full training will be comprised of six years; five of those years will be direct clinical work, and one year will be spent in full-time research. The research year will be spent with our academic partner, University of Vermont College of Medicine, as will four months of clinical experience in subspecialties such as transplant and pediatric surgery. Fifty-six months of clinical work will be completed in Danbury Hospital.

The faculty of the Danbury Hospital Department of Surgery is dedicated to maintaining a first-class educational program for our community, and to continuing to deliver the highest level of care to our patients.