Clinical Experience

Inpatient Experience

The clinical experience comprises of rotating through the division’s two host sites and one affiliated hospitals. The Los Angeles General Medical Center and the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles comprise the two host sites, while the affiliation includes Good Samaritan Hospital.

On-service faculty neonatologists conduct bedside clinical and teaching rounds in the NICUs at each of the hospitals with 24 hours a day and 7 days a week clinical coverage. These neonatal units have available advanced technologies for the treatment of complex neonatal medical conditions, including persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, the spectrum of surgical cases and extreme prematurity. Nitric oxide therapy and high frequency ventilation are available at each hospital. Additionally, the NICU at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles provides ECMO services. These represent a few examples of the many state-of-the-art technical tools available to our faculty to aid in the treatment of the sickest neonates. Importantly, clinical management practices that include the use of the latest innovative tools in the field are structured and aided by the monthly evidence-based, faculty-consensus physicians’ clinical integration meetings, by the combined effort of many years of experience from the division’s neonatologists, and by the faculty’s commitment to state-of-the-art basic, translational and clinical research, resident and fellow teaching and continuing medical education through regular reviews of the research literature and attendance at local, national and international conferences.

High Risk Follow-Up Clinic

Follow-Up Clinic rotation is part of the fellowship training under the direction of the developmental pediatricians Dr. Michael Regalado and Dr. Lisa Guerra Vargas at Los Angeles General Medical Center. In addition, fellows also attend High Risk Infant Follow-up Service at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to follow patients treated with inhaled nitric oxide and / or ECMO. The fellow is able to perform complete neurobehavioral examinations on the newborn infant and distinguish normal and abnormal findings at varying gestational ages. The fellow gets training with physical examination and evaluation skills of the premature and developmentally suspect NICU graduates, and develops evaluation skills for various ages up to 3 years of life with special emphasis on the first year of life. The fellow is also taught skills to be able to provide information, education and guidance to parents of infants with varying disabilities. The goal is for fellows to become familiar with the services that are available to infants with a variety of disabilities and how or through which agencies the services may be obtained.