A message from the Program Director

Dear prospective cardiology fellow,

Thank you in advance for your interest in our training program.  In this letter, I hope to give you an overview of our fellowship and provide answers to some common questions that we are asked during our interview season.  While there is nothing that substitutes for an in person opportunity for you to meet us and for us to meet you, we are living and training in a different time and we all must adapt.  Once again, will be conducting all interviews virtually.  We will have interview sessions (panel) with our attendings and separate breakout rooms with our fellows.

Danbury Hospital is one hospital in a network of hospitals under the umbrella of Nuvance Health. This hospital, the training site, has close to 400 medical/surgical beds.  The city of Danbury is located in Fairfield county Connecticut, has a population of close to 100,000, but serves a greater community of approximately 225,000 people in the primary service area.  Our location is a 70 miles from New York City and is easily accessible by car, bus or train.  Our patients come from diverse backgrounds and represent all levels of socioeconomic classes.  Locally, Fairfield country has access to great restaurants, beaches, schools, and lots of outdoor activities.

There are numerous strengths of our program. Here are some highlights.

• Administrative support: our program is able to evolve and adapt and truly be a cutting edge program thanks to the strong support of our leadership of the Heart and Vascular Institute.
• Commitment to learning: our faculty are dedicated to teaching our fellows. As a division with only 20 faculty members, we are able to provide a very individualized approach to training.
• Large volume of cases: we do over 400 cardiac MRIs a year and are starting to grow our coronary CTA program as well. Our echo laboratory performs over 11,000 transthoracic echoes, transesophageal echoes, and stress echoes annually; our nuclear cardiology lab performs between 1500 and 2000 SPECT and PET studies per year, the Cath Lab does over 1200 cases each year, including over 300 interventions and performed structural cases including TAVR, PFO closure and MitraClip. Our EP lab does close to 200 ablations and 300 device implants each year.
• Mentorship: another benefit of a small to moderate sized faculty is the opportunity for our fellows to get to know our faculty on a personal level. As a result, our attendings are easily approachable and provide mentorship on everything from research projects to career advice. We do not formally assign a fellow a specific mentor, but allow for similar interests guide which attending acts as a mentor for a specific fellow.
• No advanced fellows: we not have EP fellows, interventional fellows, heart failure fellows, preventive fellows, or advanced imaging fellows. As a result, our fellows are the ones who are first in line to perform and learn advanced cardiology skills. While one may argue that this does not allow someone to stay on for advanced fellowship, we have been able to place our fellowship of their choice.  Approximately half of our fellows go into clinical practice while the other half pursue additional training.  Prior fellows have gone into an advanced imaging fellowship, an interventional fellowship, a preventive fellowship, advanced heart failure fellowship, and an electrophysiology fellowship.
• Hearts Around the World: one of our full-time faculty, Dr. Robert Jarrett, runs a nonprofit organization that travels to China, Vietnam, and Cuba where he and a team of cardiologists, anesthesiologists, surgeons, and nurses from all over the country go and teach teams at these locations how to improve cardiovascular care in the local communities.
• Sim lab: Danbury Hospital has a state of the art simulation lab where our fellows can practice their echocardiography skills (transthoracic and transesophageal).

Our fellows are primarily stationed in Danbury during their fellowship. As a compliment to their training, our fellows do rotate in Hartford, CT to work with our pediatric cardiology colleagues to gain experience evaluating patients with congenital heart disease and they spend a month at Yale on the heart failure service where the participate in the care of pre- and post transplant patients.

Our core curriculum is two tiered.  We hold a “boot camp” during the summer where the fellows have daily lectures on core topics.  Over the remaining 9-10 months there is a mixture of advanced imaging conferences, joint pathology conferences, morning report (3 days a week), and ECG conference that occur each week.

While I can promise you that you will learn the fundamentals of cardiovascular care at almost every fellowship, what makes Danbury special is the patient diversity (breadth and depth of cases) of our patients, faculty devotion to the fellowship, and the fact that we create a personal approach to fellow’s learning.  We pride ourselves on the “family” environment here at Danbury and want people who want to train with us.

We accept 2 fellows each year and hope that you consider our program if it seems like a fit for you.

Please feel free to reach out to me, or Nicole Lozada (our program administrator), or to any of our fellows if you want/need more information.

Dr. Russell Stein, MD, FACC, RPVI
Program Director, Cardiovascular Disease
Danbury Hospital, Danbury CT
Russell.Stein@nuvancehealth.org

Dr. Joseph Burdowski
Associate Program Director, Cardiovascular Disease
Danbury Hospital, Danbury CT
Joseph.Burdowski@nuvancehealth.org

Nicole Lozada
Program Administrator, Cardiovascular Disease
Danbury Hospital, Danbury CT
Nicole.Lozada@nuvancehealth.org