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Whoa baby! OB-GYN residency program delivers ... often

For physicians-in-training who want to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology (OB-GYN), there aren't many places where they'll see more action than the KU School of Medicine-Wichita's residency program.

For physicians-in-training who want to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology (OB-GYN), there aren't many places where they'll see more action than the KU School of Medicine–Wichita's residency program.

The program is based at Wesley Medical Center, where doctors typically deliver between 6,200 and 6,500 babies a year. "I think it's probably the largest OB-GYN unit in a 13- or 14-state area," said Dr. David Grainger, who is the school's Daniel K. Roberts Professor, and chairs the school's department of OB-GYN.

Over the course of the four-year program, each resident may have a hand in delivering 1,000 to 1,500 babies, including forceps-assisted, vacuum-assisted, and Caesarean procedures.

Residents are also trained in hysterectomies and other surgeries. During one recent year, graduating residents performed 162 hysterectomies, according to the school's records.

"When you look at our program, we're in the 99th percentile for obstetrics, and up in the nineties for gynecological procedures also," Grainger said, referring to how the department's volume of cases compares with other programs.

Currently, six residents in the OB-GYN program come from Kansas, all but one of them is a graduate of the Wichita campus. Others come from as far away as California, the Dakotas, and Minnesota.

"It's a very competitive residency," Grainger says. "We recruit our KU grads pretty heavily, but we train them well and they're very competitive" in finding spots in residency programs elsewhere.

Third- and fourth-year medical students on the Wichita campus also do their six-week clinical rotations at Wesley, during which time they can be involved in as many as 40 deliveries. Family medicine residents deliver babies there as well.

The school's OB-GYN department is comprised of 44 faculty members, 36 of whom are volunteers, Grainger says. Physicians Travis Stembridge, Zachary Kuhlmann, and Michael Brown lead the program with Grainger.

Aside from the quality of the faculty, Grainger credits Wesley's reputation for pediatrics and newborn intensive care for making the hospital the go-to place for babies and moms.

"It's kind of a package deal," he says. "A lot of pieces come together to provide that level of care that has attracted the attention of consumers."

Wesley's prominence in OB-GYN and the residency program itself predate KU's involvement, he noted. The residency program was set up as a community program, unaffiliated with any school before the KU School of Medicine-Wichita was established in the 1970s.

Dr. Roberts, founding chair of the school's OB-GYN department, took it to a new level before his death in 1994, Grainger says. "He was a major player in the development of the medical school," he says. "His wife was also really involved."

Grainger, a 1981 Wichita graduate, said Roberts taught students not to presume that any delivery would be complication-free. That remains the department's approach to obstetrics.  "He said, 'A routine delivery is a postpartum diagnosis.' Each pregnant woman who comes in ... you just don't know what's going to happen."

"Our hospital is a very homey, wonderful place to have your baby, but right behind the curtain is Intensive Care. We're always watching for that person who might need that."

Grainger himself was born at Wesley, about 100 yards from where his office now sits. He volunteered at the hospital when he was young, and worked his way through college at Wichita State University at Wesley. He returned to KU School of Medicine–Wichita to teach in 1990, after stints in Hays and a fellowship at Yale.

"I'm a Wichitan," he says.

 

 


KU School of Medicine-Wichita