FELLOWSHIP OVERVIEW
Our Fellowship in Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine has many unique features, which distinguish it from other fellowship programs. An indicator of the academic quality of our program is the fact that the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine ranks number one in research funding from the National Institutes of Health among the 24 Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the southeastern United States (Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida). The Section on Maternal-Fetal Medicine has been a member of the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development since 1991. This is a five-year competitive renewal program for which the Section on Maternal-Fetal Medicine recently received reapproval for the period of 2001 through 2006. The Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology is also a recipient of a Women's Reproductive Health Research Career Development Center (WRHR) grant, one of only 20 in the United States and the only one in the southeastern United States. The WRHR grants are designed to support the training of investigators in obstetrics and gynecology and have been awarded to departments which have been judged to excel in this area. Only four Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology nationwide have been members of the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network since 1991 or longer and at the same time are recipients of the WRHR grant. Participation in the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network provides our fellows with exceptional opportunities for participation in first-class clinical research in Obstetrics. The opportunity exists to obtain a Masters degree in Epidemiology or Health Services Research in our Department of Public Health Sciences. The conditions for clinical training and research are quite extraordinary because there is only one obstetrical service for a four county area. Thus there can be no loss of obstetrical patients to other institutions as has been observed in many other areas across the country. There have been a growing number of deliveries in the obstetrical service at Forsyth Medical Center with 6,563 deliveries during the year 2000 making it one of the largest obstetrical services at a medical school in the United States. We have a well-delineated referral area for which we have essentially no competition with an increasing number of maternal transports reaching 584 such transports during the year 2000. In addition to these exceptional opportunities for clinical training and clinical research in Maternal-Fetal Medicine, our fellowship program is unique in providing opportunities for basic research using animal models such as the fetal lamb or the transgenic mouse. Thus fellows receive training in basic research enabling them to investigate questions which cannot be answered by research at the bedside but rather in the laboratory. Our fellows spend 50% of their time in clinical and/or basic research and in the last decade, all of the fellows have published the results of their research in prestigious medical journals. Moreover, in the last decade, all of the fellows in the program obtained faculty positions in academic medical centers upon completion of their training. The success rate of our fellows in obtaining subspeciality board certification is well above the national average. Thus, the objective evidence indicates the fellowship program achieves its major goals of providing excellent clinical training in maternal-fetal medicine in combination with opportunities to conduct first rate research in a highly supportive environment