Cahaba Family Medicine
Emergency Medicine Fellowship 

Program information

This fellowship was created to develop the competencies of rural family medicine physicians in triage, evaluation, stabilization, and management of the acutely ill or injured patient. Each fellow will receive 12 months of intensive training in emergency medicine with an emphasis on delivering emergent care in the rural community. In addition, training will include instruction on developing community EMS guidelines and prevention programs.

The Cahaba-UAB Family Medicine Residency was established to respond to the state’s continued shortage of rural family medicine physicians. This ED fellowship will address the need for additional training for enhanced competency in higher volume, higher acuity rural EDs. CEO and Director of Cahaba Family Medicine Residency Program, Dr. John B. Waits remarked “There is a whole universe of rural hospitals – including UAB's "360o backyard" – that are staffed physicians like me, who got our ED training, for better or for worse, with a couple of months of an ED rotation in an internship and then moonlighting opportunities. Those hospitals can't recruit (or afford) traditional ED docs but they can afford Family Docs and my existential fear is that more and more Family Docs will abandon the multiple traditional roles/locations/hats that we have traditionally provided to the healthcare system, favoring "ambulatory only" jobs to the detriment of the whole healthcare system.”

The ED fellowship is an opportunity to add a critical extra PGY-4 year for enhanced training to effectively meet the needs of rural communities in our state. “This is the spirit and energy that UAB’s (and Cahaba’s) Family Medicine Department is trying to bring. Not pushing envelopes to replace existing subspecialty roles, but to instead be just that much better trained for our historic roles in the healthcare system.”

This longitudinal fellowship will feature core shifts each month at Children’s Hospital of Alabama (Birmingham), Bibb Medical Center (Centreville), and J. Paul Jones (Camden) as fellows and junior partners. Fellows also have weekly didactics, FM ambulatory clinic, radiology, EKG, and ultrasound throughout the year. Fellows provide quarterly didactic and/or interactive presentations and participate in the supervision and education of FM Residents. The following certifications will be expected to be obtained and maintained during the fellowship: ATLS, PALS, NRP, ALSO.