Q+A with Dr. Shannon Toohey, Residency Program Director at UC Irvine Emergency Medicine
Interviewed by Gina Hana (UC Irvine)
Accessible Text Version
What are some things you want to tell students about your program?
I think one of the biggest things for people to know about UC Irvine is that although we are not a huge name, we are in our 27th year of being a residency, and so we are a fairly old program and we have a lot of experience training residents. We are also a fairly small program – 9 residents a year for 3 years, so 27 residents total. We only have 20 faculty members. Everyone gets to know each other really well, and it ends up being like a family. Additionally, we have a large, diverse patient population. We serve a lot of underrepresented, low socioeconomic patients, which a lot of us really enjoy. Lastly, our residents get phenomenal jobs. Some of the highest-paying, most desirable jobs in Orange County are run by former UCI graduates, and when they need to hire someone, they ask me for hiring recommendations. A lot of our graduates do stay in Southern California, but we have plenty of people leave the state as well, and we have plenty of contacts to help those people get jobs.
What sets your program apart from others in California?
Our program operates as a mixed function. We are not necessarily a community hospital or an academic hospital or a county hospital; we are all three. There is no county hospital in Orange County, so we end up being the de facto county hospital because historically, forty years ago, we were, and so we have the county feel, where we get a lot of lower socioeconomic patients or uninsured or undocumented patients. We also have the academic influence, where you can do research and you have access to a lot of fellowships for different subspecialties. But we are also a community hospital. We have fairly high patient volumes, we work fairly quickly, and our residents learn to be very efficient, which is what you need when you are done and enter into the workforce. We are proud of that mixed picture.
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[Included in our Q3 newsletter. Editor: Tiffany Fan]
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