Our Chief Residents Welcome You to North Florida!

Welcome to the UCF North Florida Emergency Medicine Residency! As the chief residents, we are excited to tell you about our program and show you why we love training at North Florida. Our program is more than just a residency, we are a family. Our close-knit group includes attendings, residents, APPs, nurses, paramedics, and all of the ED staff. This family atmosphere makes coming to work everyday enjoyable and fun!

Our emergency department is a fast paced, high acuity, busy referral center for the entire North Florida network of affiliated hospitals. This means we see a very diverse, often sick, population. We have a wide array of specialists available for consult which makes our hospital a major receiving center for many rural emergency departments as well. North Florida is a comprehensive stroke and STEMI center and we work closely with our neurology and cardiology teams to ensure that North Florida is the hospital of choice for North Central Florida stroke and STEMI care. Our shifts always keep us on our toes; there is rarely a shift that goes by without multiple stroke alerts, STEMIs, sepsis alerts, and more often than not, a major resuscitation. 

North Florida is a 532-bed full-service medical and surgical acute care center. We see approximately 114K patients per year between our main emergency department, fast track area, and three freestanding emergency departments. Our main department frequently treats critical care patients and admits them to our 48-bed inpatient ICU/CVICU. Our volume and acuity of patients allows residents to become comfortable with procedures and resuscitations by the end of their intern year! We get a full trauma experience during our longitudinal trauma rotation at a very busy trauma center in Central Florida. As North Florida has no other surgical residencies, there are no other residents competing with us for procedures. We do all of our own reductions, sedations, nerve blocks, ENT procedures, chest tubes, intubations/airways, joint aspirations and more! 

As an intern, you can rest assured that there will always be a PGY-2 or PGY-3 on shift to manage the high acuity patients, allowing you to ease into your role and learn proper management and skills before taking on the critical cases. During resuscitations, our interns manage the airway with the attending while the senior resident runs the resuscitation. We ensure that every resident gets experience working night shifts and freestanding shifts to gain exposure to a variety of patient populations and levels of acuity. 

Your experience doesn’t end in the emergency department. As a senior resident on your ICU rotation, you will get to lead an ICU team, supervising intern and junior residents from our own program as well as from other specialties. You will be responsible for the care of some of the most complex medical and cardiac patients in the entire hospital. Outside of the hospital setting we get to learn and challenge our procedural skills in our state-of-the-art simulation lab run by one of our core faculty members, Dr. Stern. We have a simulation lab experience every month and get hands-on experience with procedures like cricothyrotomies, bronchoscopies, difficult intubations, joint aspirations, thoracotomies, lumbar punctures, complicated infant deliveries, and so much more!

The icing on the cake is our amazing attendings! They volunteer their time to ensure that at least 3-4 members are present at weekly conferences and are available at any time for questions, concerns, or extra help with study material, procedures, anything, you name it! They have invested their own private group’s time, money, and energy into making our resident experience the best that it can be. Our attendings truly want to see us thrive and become top-notch emergency medicine physicians. They provide us with several resident events throughout the year including a fall and spring wellness day and the famous senior cruise after graduation! We are thrilled that you have shown interest in our program and can’t wait for the class of 2028 to join us!