Caring for patients before, during, and after
their surgical experience
From the chair:
Welcome to the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Columbia is a city of approximately 100,000 population located in the center of the state. It is home to Missouri's flagship university, MU, which includes schools of medicine, nursing, health professions, veterinary medicine, business, law and engineering. Surrounded with beautiful rolling hills nearby the Missouri River, Columbia offers a very high standard of living and some of the finest public schools in the country at relatively low cost, along with the wide range of cultural activities one would expect in a well-respected university setting.
The Department of Anesthesiology has approximately 28 faculty members. The residency program is small but growing, presently accepting four positions in each year. We provide anesthesia services to three locations. The University Hospital includes a Level-1 Trauma Center and supports a broad range of surgical exposures in 12 general ORs, a same-day surgery program with 4 OR's and off-site services. The hospital is rapidly expanding, particularly the cardiovascular and neuroscience subspecialties, with the goal of becoming a center of excellence in those arenas. In addition, the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute opened in June 2010. It is the region's largest and most comprehensive freestanding orthopaedic facility with 6 OR's dedicated to orthopedic surgery. Finally, in September 2010, MU's Columbia Regional Hospital was transitioned to the Women and Children's Hospital, focusing on the health care needs of those populations. At WCH we operate 8 OR's plus the Labor and Delivery suite that includes C-sections, and offsite locations.
These exciting changes provide the department an opportunity to redefine itself and expand. We are developing dedicated clinical service lines, and actively recruiting new faculty members to cover those subspecialties. The impact of these changes on residency training is enormous; subspecialty training opportunities that were previously not readily available are becoming a part of the core and advanced clinical experiences. In addition, recruitment of nationally recognized faculty members provides us an opportunity to provide enrichment programs — including business management, professionalism and ethics, and research design — to supplement our existing academic offerings.
Beyond all that is happening at the University of Missouri, anesthesiology is simply an exciting and rewarding profession. After 30 years in anesthesiology, I feel fortunate to say that it is a practice that I still enjoy on a daily basis. The intensity and rapid reward of anesthesiology provides a uniquely personal approach to patient care, and provides the type of immediate gratification that makes one look forward to coming in to work each day.
I invite you to review our site, and feel free to contact me or any of the other faculty members directly through the website for your questions.
J.L. Reeves-Viets, MD, MBA
