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University of South Florida
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Program Information
Residents per class
3
University of South Florida Orthopedic Surgery Residency Program
User reviews
4 reviews
Overall rating
8.3
Staff Surgeons
8.3(4)
Didactics/Teaching
8.0(4)
Operating Experience
8.3(4)
Clinical Experience
8.0(4)
Research
8.0(4)
Residents
8.3(4)
Lifestyle
8.8(4)
Location
8.8(4)
Overall Experience
8.3(4)
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Well Rounded Program Quickly Rising to the Top
(Updated: May 31, 2016)
Residency is now Officially USF/FOI residency
Program Review
Staff / Faculty / Chairman
Chairman: Roy Sanders—Editor for JOT, nationally renowned in trauma literature (i.e. Sanders classification), very powerful, driven individual--became chairman of the residency in 2015. CEO of Florida Orthopaedic Institute--the largest private ortho group in the state of Florida, and therefore doesn't HAVE to be the chair but genuinely WANTS to educate residents and is dedicated to the program.
Program Director: Hassan Mir—Editor for the online OTA Newsletter, an up-and-coming name in trauma, moved from Vanderbilt to USF for the program director position. He is young and energetic and runs a tight ship on the trauma service, great educator and mentor.
Staff: mostly private, good mix of young and old, Florida Orthopaedic Institute, choose to work with the residents, all of them are personally and professionally successful and most are enthusiastic about resident education. Even the ortho trauma service is run by trauma guys that are part of Florida Orthopaedic Institute--a very unique situation where residents learn a lot about private practice. A lot of very young and enthusiastic attendings that allow residents to operate and love to teach. We have 2-4 attendings in every specialty that all trained at different places around the country and the discussions we have during our educational conferences are invaluable because each of them are experts and they talk about different nuances in all aspects of their specialty that you can only get from having breadth in your faculty in each specialty.
Program Director: Hassan Mir—Editor for the online OTA Newsletter, an up-and-coming name in trauma, moved from Vanderbilt to USF for the program director position. He is young and energetic and runs a tight ship on the trauma service, great educator and mentor.
Staff: mostly private, good mix of young and old, Florida Orthopaedic Institute, choose to work with the residents, all of them are personally and professionally successful and most are enthusiastic about resident education. Even the ortho trauma service is run by trauma guys that are part of Florida Orthopaedic Institute--a very unique situation where residents learn a lot about private practice. A lot of very young and enthusiastic attendings that allow residents to operate and love to teach. We have 2-4 attendings in every specialty that all trained at different places around the country and the discussions we have during our educational conferences are invaluable because each of them are experts and they talk about different nuances in all aspects of their specialty that you can only get from having breadth in your faculty in each specialty.
Didactics / Teaching
Didactics/Teaching: 2 hours with beer and food served every Tuesday night, then 2 hours with breakfast served every Friday morning. Followed an the AAOS CORR book for curriculum. 6 Anatomy labs through the year with fresh frozen cadavers, and other cadavers available upon request.
Operating Experience
Operating Experience: Most operative experience on trauma, hand, joints, and VA where you have done 30-50 primary total hips/knees from skin to skin by the time you are a 3, 10-15 distal radius fractures and fix other common forearm fractures as a junior resident, and have done 10-20 tibial/femoral nails as a junior resident, also I had done skin to skin ~20 shoulder scopes and ~20 knee scopes as a junior level resident. This is just a highlight, but operative experience is good and we are actively working every year to make it better.
Clinic Experience
Clinical Experience: These are high-volume private practice guys that see anywhere from 60-90 patients per day in clinic. So you see everything. A lot of referrals from around the central to western part of the state, FOI is well-regarded by orthopaedists in the region and they get a lot of academic-type, complicated cases in addition to the bread and butter.
Research Opportunities
Research: You can look up Foundation for Orthopaedic Research and Education (FORE), which is a non-profit organization that FOI created. I could probably write a whole page on how amazing FORE is. They have a biomechanical lab and staff and everything else needed to make a research machine. They have CME courses throughout the year all over the country and when the course is at FORE labs, the residents usually can go for free (and if there are any cadavers left over, we have the opportunity to dissect or use them for research) Additionally, the trauma guys have a database that can be mined with questions for retrospective clinical research. You can do as much or as little as you want with regards to research, but the opportunities are endless and the support staff is there if you want to publish a ton. Plus Sanders is the editor of JOT and knows the ropes in how to write quality papers that get into quality journals.
Residents
Residents: the best, hands down, and the main reason why I came here (Of course I am biased). Good mix of single and married, married with kids. 4 per year. 2 females, but very female friendly program. All the residents are down-to-earth people, who enjoy spending time with one another and hang out a lot outside of work, but work hard when they need to. Love this group and will miss them dearly when I move on.
Lifestyle
Lifestyle: busy, but its residency. You put in most of your time as a 2 and a 3, 4th year is pretty chill. 5th year—no in-house call, you only go in to operate. Additionally, we all help each other out if there are vacations that someone wants to go on, etc, if you want to go somewhere—Italy, Spain, Brazil, Bahamas (yes we have residents that have all gone to these locations in the past year), we will make sure your schedule works. We have an annual deep sea fishing tournament, golf tournament and then a bunch of socials throughout the year.
Location / Housing
Location: Tampa is a great city, not for “big city” people per se. It’s a small city, easy to get around, light traffic. MLB, NHL (probably the biggest sport in the city as far as fans go), and NFL teams. Named in the top five in the country for number of microbreweries. A lot of new restaurants are popping up and there is a major renovation going on in Downtown. Very clean downtown, and very safe. Low crime rate. And then, of course, Disney world and all of the Orlando attractions are an easy 1hr drive away.Probably half of the residents own houses or condos, some live in high rises downtown. Very affordable. Plus, you live within an hour of some of the best beaches in the world (many have been named on the travel channel top ten in the country.
Limitations
No spine trauma call, so we only get cold spine trauma (this may change in the future). Rotations are spread out. One is in St. Pete (~30 min drive), one is in Wesley Chapel (~45 min drive), but those are only 3 month rotations.
Overall Rotation Experience / Conclusion
Overall Experience: I am going to try to not be biased, but of course I am. I think this is a great residency education and the more I progress through residency, the more I appreciate it. We are making great strides in improving aspects of our residency that are weak. But really, the reason I came here is because it is a very well-rounded program already. The things that were important to me were all checked off my list: good research capabilities with support staff and facilities to accomplish as much or as little research as desired, multiple faculty at each position, solid operative experience, team-like atmosphere in the residency, good resident-attending relationships (we actually have fun together) and a great place to live if you’re single or if you want to raise a family.
Qualification
I am a current resident of this program.
Date of Rotation
2013 to 2016
AA
Ashley Ali
Top 100 Reviewer
Below Average program
(Updated: January 01, 2012)
Overall rating
4.2
Staff Surgeons
4.0
Didactics/Teaching
4.0
Operating Experience
4.0
Clinical Experience
4.0
Research
4.0
Residents
4.0
Lifestyle
5.0
Location
5.0
Overall Experience
4.0
Qualification
I rotated as a medical student at this program
Date of Rotation
2011
CW
Chris Williams
Top 500 Reviewer
PGY 5 Review of USF Ortho
(Updated: January 01, 2012)
Overall rating
10.0
Staff Surgeons
10.0
Didactics/Teaching
10.0
Operating Experience
10.0
Clinical Experience
10.0
Research
10.0
Residents
10.0
Lifestyle
10.0
Location
10.0
Overall Experience
10.0
I am currently a 5th year resident and will be graduating next month. Overall I am extremely satisfied with my training and would recommend this residency highly to all medical students who are independent, self-motivated leaders....it is not a program designed to spoon feed you. I wanted to update everyone on an important change to our trauma experience. We have taken over all trauma call responsibilities at Tampa General Hospital and have also started a new PGY 3 trauma rotation. Prior to this change, our trauma experience was qualitatively good but lacked quantity . With this change we have improved the quantity substantially and I would say our trauma experience is now exceptional.
Qualification
I am a current resident of this program.
Date of Rotation
2007 to 2012
BP
Brian Palumbo
Top 500 Reviewer
USF
(Updated: December 10, 2011)
Overall rating
8.9
Staff Surgeons
9.0
Didactics/Teaching
8.0
Operating Experience
9.0
Clinical Experience
8.0
Research
8.0
Residents
9.0
Lifestyle
10.0
Location
10.0
Overall Experience
9.0
Program Review
Staff / Faculty / Chairman
Fantastic program director - Dr. Doug Letson. He's a true resident advocate and will soon make this program a top-tier place to train.
Didactics / Teaching
They have three hours of didactic teaching every Wednesday morning at 6:30am and a variety of service dependent conferences throughout the week. The residents get pimped during the weekly fracture conference, but the rest of the didactics are generally lectures. I didn't think the pimping was malignant at all, and the residents know the literature better than any other residents at other programs that I rotated.
Operating Experience
Above average. Not a crazy, nail a hundred femurs a day sort of experience, but I got the feeling that you would be very well-trained in bread and butter procedures and more complex procedures with the resources available at FOI.
Clinic Experience
The residents are in clinic 1-2 days a week depending on the service and the majority of the services have a resident-run clinic once a week. The residents do everything on their own, but there is always an attending around to run questions by if they need it. I got to see a lot of patients on my own and then presented to the chief resident who would help me come up with a treatment plan. The residents were very helpful and tried to teach the sub-i's whenever they could. They also have an indications conference once a week where they present the previous week's clinic patients where they have to defend their surgical indications in front of a panel of experts in their field so that by the time they finish residency they know how to properly indicate patients for surgery.
Research Opportunities
Research is strongly emphasized because the program director is really into research. From what I heard, the residents are required to have three publications before they graduate (usually a case report, review article and clinical study) as well as submit a research grant proposal. Some residents thought that this was a little much, but in the end it's probably good for your career.
Residents
Great group of guys.
Lifestyle
Unbelievable. Second to none.
Location / Housing
Tampa is fantastic.
Limitations
The only problem I personally saw with the program (and what kept it from being in my top 3 programs) is the lack of in-depth experience on trauma at Tampa General Hospital. This is a top trauma fellowship, but the USF residents are kind of lost in the crowd as residents from several other programs are rotating at TGH also. I think if USF were to expand their experience at TGH and take more call, it would GREATLY improve the residency, in my opinion.
Overall Rotation Experience / Conclusion
A great, under-rated place that will be top tier with the proper leadership and some adjustments.
Qualification
I rotated as a medical student at this program
Date of Rotation
2009
JS
Jerry Stephens
Top 50 Reviewer
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