SOUTH FLORIDA

Florida Atlantic University

By Dr. Elizabeth Calhoun, PGY-2

Greetings from Florida Atlantic University! This has been quite an interesting season. Our small, lively group has managed to turn even WebEx residency conferences into interactive didactic sessions. Our ED volumes sank transiently due to the pandemic, but are now leveling out to a high-acuity-normal.

We will greatly miss our program’s first graduation class, wishing the best for Drs. Damien Carracedo, Matt Wallace, Sean Argo, Daniel Parks, Jeff Klein and Ben Mazer. With most of our graduates continuing to practice in Florida, we are glad they are able to stay in the sunshine.

We are excited to welcome our new interns: Drs. Tony Bruno, Tim Buckley, Collin Hickey, Daniella Lamour, Chris Williams and Miheal Plantak. We wish everyone a safe summer as we return to our new normal. ■ Greetings from Mount Sinai! First we’d like to extend a warm welcome to our new intern class, Drs. Matthew Apicella, Alyssa Eily, Ilya Luschitsky, Brijesh Patel, Dominique Pinzon, Daniel Puebla and Christopher Wong—we are excited to see such promising talent! Our residents continue to thrive in the “new normal” following COVID-19. Residents are engaging in weekly online didactics. Drs. Stephanie Fernandez and Fenil Patel presented posters in the virtual

Kendall Regional Medical Center

By Ibrahim Hasan, MD, Kristina Drake, MD & Sara Zagroba, MD, PGY-3s

Emergency Medicine Residency Co-Chiefs

Kendall’s EM residents would like to welcome our new intern class to the family! As of this summer, we now have all three years of residency classes on board. We have a great new class and are excited to get to know them better.

This has been an exciting year for Kendall Regional Emergency Medicine. Our residents recently participated in the ACEP national SIM Wars competition in Denver, CO, where we took second place. This was under the guidance and training of our Simulation Director and Associate Program Director, Dr. Antionette Golden. The team trained hard throughout the year, coming in early mornings before conferences and shifts to run practice cases. AAEM conference. We also look forward to hosting our colleagues in South Florida residencies during our annual Ultrasound Workshop in July. As the academic year concludes, we extend a bittersweet farewell not only to our PGY-3 class, but to our core faculty member, Dr. Laurie Boge. We are lucky to have worked with such an outstanding clinician and value her dedication, guidance and friendship. More exciting news is that Kendall Regional Emergency Medicine will be welcoming its first round of fellows for our new ultrasound fellowship! This fellowship will be under the guidance of Dr. Moises Moreno, our ultrasound director, as well as Drs. Emilio Volz and Nicole Aviles, who are ultrasound fellows. This tremendous milestone could not have been done without the hard work and dedication of our program leadership and staff. We are tempted to say that our program has one of the best ultrasound curriculums in the country! Residents become experts in bedside ultrasound under the guidance of these great teachers and mentors,

Mount Sinai Medical Center

By Stephanie Fernandez, MD, PGY-3

and now to add two fellows. ■

events, our program has taken the time to reflect and open a dialogue regarding disparities within the medical field as well as society as a whole. We aim to look inward to confront our inherent biases and strive to support justice and equality for our colleagues and our patients.

From Mount Sinai, we wish you all a safe and successful new academic year. ■

Jackson Memorial Hospital

By EM Residency Program Staff

We are sad and concerned about Florida’s new daily Covid-19 records and the state possibly pausing its reopening. We are certainly seeing an increase of positive cases throughout our system. To think that we were so hopeful that things would settle down and allow us to have a semi-normal graduation. Alas...

With that said, we did hold a very successful Zoom graduation where well over 100 family members, friends, and alumni joined us virtually to celebrate this milestone. We had a very touching tribute video, which included a multitude of warm messages and wishes for all our residents. We were also extremely proud to celebrate our resident award recipients. Among others, Dr. Anwar Ferdinand received our “Sunshine award,” which is given to the resident who always has a positive outlook, promotes other residents’ wellness and is a delight to have on shift. Dr. Desiree Delgado was the proud recipient of our “Clinical Excellence award” for excellent clinical acumen and caring bedside manners. Lastly, our overall “Resident of the Year award” went to Dr. Timothy Montrief for demonstrating excellence through clinical performance, bedside teaching, mentorship, scholarly activities and exemplary behavior.

Our virtual days are not over. Not only did we take advantage of AliEM’s Bridge to EM modules for our Class of 2023, but most of their orientation was done remotely. Time will tell as to how this will affect our interns’ learning, but it seems to be working well. We also had the privilege of having Dr. David Talan as our Grand Round guest speaker on July 1.

As we congratulate our class of 2020 and wish them the best in their careers, we are invigorated to welcome our new recruits and look forward to another great academic year. The work goes on, but stay safe everyone! ■

CLINCON 2020

In celebration of the CLINCON National Symposium, we want to thank the brave men and women who serve as EMS providers for their dedication for responding to medical emergencies and saving lives.

St. Lucie Medical Center

By Shelby Guile, DO, PGY-2

Here at St. Lucie Medical Center, we have been working hard to be flexible and resilient during this unprecedented time. Similar to many other programs, we have had to adjust our didactics on a weekly basis to continue facilitating the best learning opportunities and keep everyone safe and healthy. We have enjoyed lectures via video conferences amongst our program, and have participated in ACEP virtual grand rounds, University of Maryland and ALiEM connect. We have also adapted to lower patient volumes and shorter hours as have many other departments in the country.

This pandemic has come at an especially bad time for our graduating seniors who we will not be able to celebrate in the grand fashion that we usually provide to send them off to begin their careers as attendings. We are very sad to see them go, but also proud and excited for their careers to really begin. Chief resident Dr. Oliver Morris will be heading to Oak Hill in Spring Hill, FL; Dr. Kevin Summers will be working at AnMed in Anderson, SC; Dr. Chrissy Gonzalez will be working at Lawnwood Regional in Fort Pierce, FL; and we are thrilled to be adding Dr. Alexandra Chitty to our faculty here at St Lucie. Lastly, congratulations to our new chief resident, Dr. Mike Drechsler, who has already been hard at work as we prepare to transition back to normal program activities. ■

Aventura Hospital

By Dr. Scarlet Benson

Assistant Clinical Professor

Although the coronavirus pandemic drastically affected the practice of both clinical and academic medicine, Aventura residents and faculty continued to contribute in many ways. The CEME Scientific Research Competition was transmitted to booklet form, and ultrasound gurus Drs. Vu Tran and Guarav Patel supervised several of our residents who published the POC ultrasound cases below: • “POC US Identification of Tension Hydrothorax” by Dr. Leeran

Baraness • “POC US Diagnosis of Fournier’s

Gangrene” by Dr. Dennis James • “POC US Evaluation of Pulmonary Embolism in Pregnancy with

Cardiac Arrest” by Drs. Manuel

Obando and Benjamin Pirotte

Dr. Huy Tran also had a poster presentation accepted for AIUM (unfortunately canceled due to COVID) entitled, “Assessing barriers to supervision of trainees in use of POCUS due to cardiac arrest by emergency medicine physicians.” Dr. Erin Marra

collaborated with resident Drs. Jenny Reyes, Leeran Baraness and Hieu Duong in publishing their case, “Xanthogranulomatous Pyelonephritis: A case of the great mimicker,” in the CEME booklet as well.

Outgoing chief residents Drs. Emerson Franke and Jenny Reyes advocated for providers regarding issues such as hazard pay, the need for PPE, and medical liability coverage during the COVID era at the inaugural ACEP Virtual Hill Day on April 28. Intern Dr. Leeran Baraness published a StatPearl on Acute Headache in addition to her CEME poster publications above.

2020 has thus far been an unprecedented and difficult year, but our core faculty and residents have handled the stress with equanimity and poise. We celebrated our second graduating class on June 16 and congratulate them as they move on to the next chapter of their physician career! ■

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