Welcome to the UW Department of Neurological Surgery!
We are thrilled to have you on our service and hope that you will find your clerkship to be intellectually challenging and rewarding.
Your mission for these four weeks is to learn basics of clinical neuroscience (such as the neurological exam and localization and basic neuroimaging) as you learn about the more common and/or emergent neurological diseases, including basics of surgical and non-surgical management. Regardless of your chosen specialty, these skills and insights will be invaluable for the rest of your career.
In addition to weekly didactics, you will have a rich assortment of clinical experiences to learn from, and we encourage you to immerse yourself this month, seeing as many patients as you can, on the wards, in the OR, and in clinic. Due to the busy nature of the service and the high acuity of the patients, you may not have as much autonomy as in other clerkships. Nevertheless, you should seek as many opportunities as you can to examine patients, review their imaging, consider a differential diagnosis and workup, and propose management. As with medicine in general, the more actively you are able to apply yourself, the better you will learn.
Our faculty provide neurosurgical coverage at 5 major hospitals throughout Seattle and Spokane, which are part of the University of Washington and WWAMI system: Harborview Medical Center (HMC), University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC), Seattle Children’s Hospital (SCH), Seattle VA Medical Center (VAMC), Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center (in Spokane, WA) and Billings Clinic Hospital and Clinics (in Billings, MT),