NEW BURN SURGERY FELLOWSHIP AT CU CONDENSES TWO YEARS OF TRAINING INTO ONE

The surgical critical care fellowship with a burn focus was just accredited by the American Council for Graduate Medical Education.

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The University of Colorado Department of Surgery recently received accreditation for a new burn surgery fellowship that will allow aspiring burn surgeons to enter the field faster.

The new surgical critical care fellowship with a burn focus, explains Arek Wiktor, MD, associate professor of GI, trauma, and endocrine surgery at the CU School of Medicine, combines the critical care and burn-specific training that are historically done in separate one-year fellowships into a one-year fellowship that offers comprehensive training in both areas. The new CU fellowship — recently accredited by the American Council for Graduate Medical Education — is a one-year program in which fellows will receive a burn care certificate and become board-certified in critical care medicine.

“In general, in order to be a burn surgeon, you can go down two paths,” says Wiktor, medical director of the UCHealth Burn and Frostbite Center.

“You can do a general surgery residency and then do a one-year burn fellowship, or you can do a plastic surgery residency followed by a one-year burn fellowship. Most burn surgeons also do a critical care fellowship, because critical care is such an important component of burn care. Patients are very sick. A burn surgeon needs to be able to understand critical illness in a variety of ways to be able to optimally treat their burn patients.”