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Anesthesiology Department

Residency Program

El Pasois a modern city of nearly three-quarters of a million people sprawled across the Rio Grande River valley, desert sands, and the rambling foothills of the Franklin Mountains at the end of the Rockies.

This 400-year old city is steeped in multi-cultural heritage. The historic Mission Trail marks the Path of the Conquistadors. Legends of famous and infamous Western lawmen and badmen live on as do tales of Pancho Villa. Texas' oldest Indian tribe, the Tiguas, preserve a centuries-old culture.

El Paso is the hub of a regional trade center with an economic output of more than $12 billion a year. An international market place, the city is economically thriving and projected to continue to grow in the future.

El Paso is the Sun City. A moderate dry climate offers year 'round outdoor activities. Excellent public and private schools, a community college, a university and a health sciences center provide ample educational opportunities within the community. Churches and synagogues of all denominations serve its spiritual needs. Restaurants of every description, modern shopping malls, quaint boutiques and small family businesses provide creature comforts. Lifestyles can be urban sophisticated or rurally peaceful within the confines of the city limits. Add the international flavor of Juarez, Mexico next door and you have a place for living unlike any other.

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Texas Tech in El Paso

The School of Medicine academic building and outpatient clinical education facility are located on a university medical center campus shared with Thomason Hospital. The campus is in central El Paso with easy access to I-10 and other major thoroughfares to all points of the city.

Texas Tech University Regional Academic Health Center

The academic building contains administrative offices, the medical library, auditoriums, classrooms, academic offices, a vivarium, and research laboratories.
The Library of the Health Sciences is a regional resource for physicians and other health care professionals. The library holds 32,000 bound journals and a collection of 17,300 audio-visuals materials. Subscriptions are maintained to the top 410 journals. The system has search capabilities and interlibrary affiliations which extend the resources of the library throughout a five-state area and to the National Library of Medicine.

Thomason Hospital

County owned and operated Thomason Hospital is a 335-bed acute care facility. The hospital has a Level II & III Nursery and a Level II Trauma Center. The Emergency Department handles more than 54,000 patient visits a year including a fast track clinic opened 16 hours a day for minor illness patients. Presently the facility has an 18-bed critical care unit and an 8-bed intermediate care unit. The hospital is preparing for expansion of critical care areas.

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The Anesthesiology Residency Program in El Paso

The Anesthesiology Residency Program at Texas Tech in El Paso is a fully accredited three-year program following a base year of clinical training. The program has 3 positions per year for a total of 9 positions.

Resident experiences include general, thoracic, urological, neurological, obstetric, pediatric and gynecological surgery anesthesia; pain diagnosis treatment and management; pulmonary therapy, intensive care and emergency medicine; and applied clinical and experimental research.

The second and third postgraduate years are devoted to clinical anesthesia with concentrations on the physiological, pharmacological, and physical basics of clinical anesthesia. Each resident physician becomes thoroughly familiar with the use of inhalation and intravenous agents, muscle relaxants, and regional anesthetic techniques.

Residents are assigned to instructors who supervise their clinical activities. Residents evaluate patients pre-operatively, participate in case preparation for anesthetic procedures, and prescribe appropriate medications. Patients are followed in recovery, in the intensive care units, and through routine postoperative visits. Residents are expected to pre-op their own patients and to discuss their management with the assigned staff physician.

The second and third year experience also includes exposure to respiratory therapy, pulmonary lab, diagnosis and treatment of intractable pain, acute medicine and intensive care.

The fourth postgraduate year is planned by the resident in consultation with the department head. This year offers experiences in previously unavailable areas such as research, specialized areas of clinical anesthesiology or other fields both directly and indirectly related to anesthesiology.

The didactic portion of the program includes formal one hour lectures weekly by staff, faculty and invited speakers, and resident presentations of assigned materials moderated by the faculty. Assignment areas include basic sciences, clinical anesthesia, and related fields. Additional meetings include bi-monthly case presentations, monthly critical care conferences, journal club meetings, and weekly chapter and keyword reviews.

Research opportunities include applied pulmonary pathophysiology, pain control and pain mechanisms, malignant hyperthermia and myocardial performance, acoustic astimation of lung volumes, and emergency algorithm development.

Clinical training takes place at Thomason Hospital in El Paso. This 335-bed public hospital provides ample teaching cases for resident training. Operating rooms are equipped with the latest monitoring systems and are fully computerized using Compurecord (Tm PPG). Thomason is a Level II trauma center and a Level 3 nursery.
Specialized training includes a cardiac anesthesia rotation at Texas Heart Institute in Houston, TX and a pain management rotation at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.

The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center serves a 107 county region of West Texas through clinical education campuses in the area's four-major population centers-Lubbock, Amarillo, Odessa and El Paso.

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Medical Education at Texas Tech

Each campus has individual strengths and opportunities with programs designed to provide medical education and address the health care needs of the region.

The Texas Tech University Regional Academic Health Center at El Paso is the educational and program base for 174 physicians in 10 approved residency programs and 66 third and fourth year medical students. The campus is the site of the oldest civilian accredited residency program in Emergency Medicine in Texas. Through its outpatient clinics and affiliated teaching hospitals, Texas Tech is a major provider of health care for the El Paso southwest. Its catchment area includes southern New Mexico and northern Mexico. Medical school physicians provide care for more than 140,000 outpatient visits, 20,000 hospital admissions, 54,000 emergency department visits and delivery of more than 6,000 babies a year.

The diversified patient population provides ample training opportunities for physicians and the multi-cultural border community setting adds a unique dimension to the program.

After training at the Texas Tech University Regional Academic Health Center at El Paso, the physician is prepared to practice anywhere in today's healthcare spectrum from the urban medical center setting to the rural front lines of health care delivery.

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Application Information

Texas Tech participates in the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP).
Applicants must submit the following items for program consideration:

Anesthesiology Department
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
4800 Alberta Ave.
El Paso, TX 79905
(915) 545-6573