Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center (Anesthesiology Residency)

The Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center serves as the primary healthcare provider for more than 50,000 veterans in Southeast Texas. It is the second largest Veterans Affairs hospital in the nation. This state-of-the-art facility is a regional referral center that provides specialized diagnosis and treatment and has a full range of inpatient and outpatient services.

The training program emphasizes geriatric anesthesia and, in particular, anesthetic care for open-heart surgery, training with intra-operative echocardiography, major vascular, thoracic, urologic, neurologic, orthopedic, ENT, eye, and plastics procedures.

The Anesthesiology Service further provides anesthesia outside the operating rooms for electroconvulsive therapy, cardioversion and special radiologic procedures. The modern 18-bed Post-Anesthesia Care Unit and the 16-bed Surgical Intensive Care Unit provide the residents with extensive experience in postoperative critical care. The faculty conducts didactic lectures, morbidity and mortality conferences, transesophageal echocardiography conference, and daily case discussions

Residents also do a rotation in the chronic pain clinic. During the one-month rotation, they get exposure to the diagnosis and treatment of multiple chronic pain conditions in the VA patient populations.