Program Description
The University of Nebraska Medical Center Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology offers a 1-year ACGME-accredited fellowship in Blood Banking/Transfusion Medicine. This fellowship provides comprehensive exposure to all areas of Transfusion Medicine with special focus on cellular therapy, apheresis, and blood banking in the hospital setting. Fellows develop skills and confidence to provide medical direction over these key areas:
- Nebraska Medicine Blood Bank - provides over 30,000 blood products annually to support a Level 1 trauma center, a busy maternal fetal medicine program, and large solid-organ and hematopoietic progenitor cell transplant programs.
- Nebraska Medicine Apheresis – Transfusion Medicine faculty and fellows provide all the patient care activities and oversight for both therapeutic and donor apheresis for both adult and pediatric patients. The annual procedure volumes include approximately 1100 plasma exchanges, 325 red blood cell exchanges, 600 photopheresis procedures, 125 hematopoietic progenitor cell collections, and 70 mononuclear cell collections for CAR-T.
- Nebraska Medicine Biologic Production Facility (BPF) – A 12,000 square foot facility with clean room space that is cGTP and cGMP compliant. The BPF provides key aspects of cellular therapy processing and manufacture including plasma reduction, buffy coat enrichment, RBC reduction, CD34 cellular selection, T and/or B-cell reduction, cryopreservation, cord blood washing, dendritic cell vaccine manufacturing, alpha/beta depletion, cellular culture, trans-gene expression, electroporation, and viral vector production.
- Nebraska Medicine Coagulation Laboratory – given the key relationship between coagulation testing and blood product support for patients, the Transfusion Medicine faculty and fellows provide medical direction of laboratory testing including interpretation and selection of tests as well as recommendations for blood product support.
The fellow also rotates in the HLA laboratory and participates in weekly clinical laboratory management activities to provide example-based education in laboratory leadership that includes personnel management, equipment management, budgeting, compliance, and resource management.
Program Details
Curriculum
The fellow will participate in seven, four-week core rotations in Transfusion Medicine that covers Blood Banking and Apheresis; a four week rotation dedicated to coagulation; up to eight weeks on dedicated Cellular Therapy rotations; two weeks with Human Leukocyte Antigen rotation; an offsite two week rotation at Innovative Blood resources to experience Donor collection activities and up to eight weeks of elective time to focus the fellow’s skills in an area of interest.
Conferences
Transfusion Service didactics
Grand Rounds
Fellowship Journal Club
Transfusion Service Operations
Biologic Production Facility Operations
Apheresis Operations
Clinical Laboratory Leadership Meeting
Compensation and Benefits
A full-time salary with excellent benefits will be provided. Salary and benefits will be commensurate with level of postgraduate training. The Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology provides an attractive and nationally competitive salary and benefits package. Details of the salary, benefits, and support network can be found at the College of Medicine's Graduate Medical Education. Furthermore, our department provides additional support to its Blood Banking & Transfusion Medicine fellows to enhance their career:
- $1,000 professional development allowance per fellow for the support of academic books, board examinations and continuing education.
- Fellows are encouraged and supported by the department to present at scientific meetings. The department funds up to $2,000 in travel to professional meetings where the fellow presents their research.
- $10.00 per day meal card
- Close, covered, convenient parking
- Lab coats with laundry service
- 2 sets of black scrubs
- Access to Immunoquery, expert path, and path primer.
Facility and Resources
Environment
UNMC, and its hospital partner, Nebraska Medicine, are home to the NCI-Designated Fred and Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, Munroe-Meyer Institute for Genetics and Rehabilitation, Lied Transplant Center, Michael F. Sorrell Center for Health Science Education and Nebraska Public Health Laboratory, which will provide enhanced experiences in molecular diagnostics.
Being part of such a growing and innovative campus, we can offer our house officers with state-of-the-art facilities and resources. In our department alone, we have twenty-three primary research laboratories, lead ten shared resource cores across campus, and direct two University of Nebraska-designated research centers. In addition to the departmental library, the McGoogan Health Sciences Library on campus has over 175,000 books and 2,400 journals. These facilities and resources are available for all of our fellows to provide them with a varied and extensive training experience.
Community
Omaha is a metropolitan center of more than 900,000 people that is strategically located within a day's drive to the Rocky Mountains, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. It has been ranked highly in livability with its affordable housing and excellent school systems, as well as several institutions of higher education. In Omaha you can enjoy world-class theatre, symphony, opera, sports, concerts, art galleries, museums, dining, shopping, and more. Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium has been ranked first in the nation. If you would like to learn more about UNMC as a community or Omaha as a city to live, please see our webpage: About UNMC and Omaha