Community Anesthesia Residency Programs

[BCelectrophile]

Medical student going into anesthesia. I want to be a community anesthesiologist in a semi-rural area and get trained in a broad scope with lots of peds, regional, cardiac and ICU exposure, and seems like smaller programs without many fellowships would be good for this (I don’t want to do fellowship). Right now I see NOSM (2 seats, no fellows) and MUN (4 seats, not sure if there are fellows) as being strong contenders and hoping to do a rotation at each school. Also maybe Saskatchewan? Any advice is welcomed.

[robclem21]

The truth is any anesthesia residency program in Canada would train you well in all of those areas. If you want to see more uncommon and high-risk procedures and be trained more broadly, a larger site would be better as they typically have access to all subspecialties whereas not all rural sites do. Again though, you will get exposed to everything RC mandated no matter where you train. You should apply broadly and rank where you want to go.

[MarsRover]

The issue with training at larger centres is you will be working predominantly with staff who subspecialize to a large degree in their niche. You will see bigger cases but then ones you likely won’t see later. So while you see more broad stuff it’s hard to say how applicable that actually is unless you then subspecialize and stay at a large centre. 
 

A smaller community program will lack subspecialized stuff to a degree. However you will gain early independence and know your staff well. There is no shortage of septic sick pts anywhere in Canada. People get hit by cars everywhere too. Sask, nosm, mun will have less stabbings but more blunt moose injuries. 
 

Some programs will be somewhere between the two. Ultimately can’t go wrong either way. I have met staff who trained at toronto who by 4/5 yr most the staff still didn’t really know them. In a smaller centre by end of year 1 most staff will trust you in comparison. 
 

Comes down to what you want.