Surgical Internship Program
What makes the surgical internship at VSC unique?
Veterinary Specialty Center offers a distinctive surgical internship program that connects participants with our experienced surgical team while providing them unique educational access to our full specialty hospital and Certified Trauma Facility. The following sets this experience apart from other programs:
- Working closely with 5 board-certified surgeons with a combined experience of over 90 years exposes interns to a wide variety of perspective for surgical case management
- Daily hospital-wide/ICU rounds expose interns to comprehensive management of critically ill patients
- Post-operative case management exposes interns to client communication, problem-solving, and patient care requirements of surgical patients
- Intensive, multi-specialty didactics average 2-3 times per week and maintains the academics and foundational skills needed to be a successful surgeon. These alternating didactics include:
- Anesthesia rounds
- Cardiology rounds
- Clinical pathology rounds
- Emergency and Critical Care rounds
- Fracture rounds
- Journal club
- Morbidity and mortality rounds
- MRI/neurology rounds
- Radiology rounds
- Tobias/chapter rounds
- Wet labs to learn approaches and procedures
- Anesthesia rounds
- Primary Case Responsibility
- Working in our emergency room, interns gain exposure to primary emergency cases to keep diagnostic and client communication skills sharp. During these shifts, interns always have support from experienced emergency room doctors and ECC specialists in our Certified Level 1 Trauma Center.
- Our Shelter Animal Surgery Service (SASS) is led by our intern class. SASS provides low/no-cost elective surgery (not just sterilizations) for 250+ rescue animals per year. Interns get primary surgical responsibility (with supervision) exposing them to communications, diagnostics, surgery/procedure, postoperative care, and follow-up.