Faculty In The News

Resident Achievements

• Dr. Diana Yang with Dr. Keli Tahara won first place amongst the clinical vignettes section of the 2023  Harbor UCLA Medical Center Research Day.
• Danielle Feng (PGY3) is selected as recipient of the AAN Neurologist-in-Training Clinical Ethics Elective (Elective) for 2022-2023.
• Marissa Urbano, Dr. Sandeep Singh, Dr. Keli Tahara, Dr. Niki Maki and Dr. Nina Long have abstracts accepted at the 2022 American Academy of Neurology annual meeting.
• Dallas DelaVara, Dr. Diana Yang, and Dr. Bhakta receive 2^nd place for their abstract presented at the Harbor UCLA Medical Center Research Day.
• Diana Yang presents as PGY2 at the American Society of Neuroimaging (ASN) conference
• Stacey Ho and Dr. Yang will be presenting their abstracts at the upcoming Neurocritical Care Society Meeting.
• Dallas De La Vara is starting sports medicine and headache fellowship at the University of Florida August 2022
• Eric Tamrazian landed a neurohospitalist position at Little Company of Mary in Torrance, less than 5 miles from Harbor UCLA Medical Center

Program Developments:

• Spring 2022 our program received ACGME approval to grow each class to 5 residents per year and to add a 3^rd site, Rancho Los Amigos Hospital. With this growth, our program added 5 new additional faculty.
• In 2021, the Long Beach VA appointed chair, Dr. Rahila Ansari.   See her bio (link here).
• In summer/fall 2022, the Long Beach VA is adding 3 new faculty.

The longstanding tradition at Harbor UCLA has been to care for patients regardless of their ability to pay and to care for them as you would want your family cared for.   That tradition has not changed over the years.

What has changed?

Recently, the program has made numerous positive changes that have primarily been resident driven.

Better balance of inpatient and outpatient responsibilities:  The consult and ward teams each have a team member on the inpatient side during clinic time so that residents are not paged and interrupted during clinic.   This also allows rounds to happen earlier in the afternoon, post clinic.

Better in-service/board preparation: Starting in the 2019 academic year, the program has paid for each member of the PGY2-4 class to have their own electronic question bank (board vitals).  There are qbank sessions with faculty and residents take advantage of the qbank on their own time.

More formalized mentor program: Faculty are accessible and they all are very clinically focused.  The formalized mentor program started in the 2019 academic year helps make sure that residents meet twice per year with their faculty mentor to discuss any concerns and talk about their future goals and plans.

More useful evaluations: Residents requested to make the evaluations have feedback that was more actionable and thus the evaluations were updated in the spring of 2020 to reflect this feedback.

More organized clinic: Two residents took on a quality improvement project to help make the subspecialty clinics more efficient by assigning patients to residents ahead of time, something that traditionally has only happened in the continuity clinic.  Overall, the number of patients assigned to residents has been adjusted over the past several years in order to achieve a better service:education balance.

Funds for presenting: Although the program has always paid for the PGY4s to travel to and attend the annual American Academy of Neurology meeting, last year, the program was able to secure funding for PGY2-4s to present at other meetings as well.  This is on top of the $1000/year educational fund that residents get through the union.

The program values resident feedback.  This feedback has positively shaped the program to date and will continue to do so moving forward.