Didactic Education

From day one, residents step into a state-of-the-art curriculum built on modern educational technologies — including a flipped classroom approach, problem-based learning discussions, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality workshops and simulation. Here, didactic education doesn't look like a typical residency curriculum: we've built a program around a simple idea — the best way to learn anesthesiology is to experience it, through simulation, technology, and hands-on practice, not just lectures.

New CA-1s kick things off with a week-long orientation that includes our Escape Room Style Simulation Bootcamp — a gamified introduction to the skills and teamwork you'll rely on for the rest of residency. Throughout your training, you'll have the opportunity to use our virtual reality curriculum, partnered with Vantari VR, to practice procedures like central line placement and regional nerve blocks, building muscle memory and confidence in a zero-risk environment before you're in the room with a real patient.

As you progress, you'll take on a role as an educator yourself. We've developed an app that gives residents a structured teaching framework for mentoring the medical students and interns in our program — because learning to teach is one of the best ways to master the material, and it prepares you to teach throughout your career.

Every spring, our Annual Spring Medical Education Retreat brings together educators from across the health system to innovate within our program — many of the experiences you'll have during your training started as an idea at this retreat. And if you're excited about medical education research, you'll find a home in LEARN, the Yale Education And Research Network, where educators, medical students, and residents come together to incubate ideas for medical education research.

Our department has a dedicated simulation and multipurpose space for hosting simulations and workshops throughout residency. Our simulations cover crisis resource management and advanced airway maneuvers, including emergency front-of-neck airway access, along with OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) stations to help residents practice for the applied board exam — and, more importantly, for what really counts: patient care.

We also have virtual reality consoles and Oculus headsets to support training. These let residents practice key procedures in a safe environment.

And through our partnership with the Yale Center for Health Care Simulation, a new simulated operating room is in the works to support high-fidelity, interprofessional simulations.

Throughout the year, residents also take part in a variety of workshops. These include advanced airway management, finance and leadership in medicine, and quality and patient safety, along with sessions led by our research colleagues on interpreting research and statistics for evidence-based medicine, and workshops on managing trauma and massive transfusion.

We also offer a workshop on residents as educators, aimed at giving residents the tools they need to teach medical students during residency — and the tools they'll carry into their own future practice to teach residents of their own.

All residents and faculty come together weekly for Grand Rounds, featuring local professors who are leading in their field alongside visiting professors, plus journal club and quality improvement content. Throughout the year, we also hold combined interprofessional perioperative Grand Rounds sessions with our surgical colleagues, bringing anesthesiology and surgery together to discuss shared cases and perioperative care.

Grand Rounds is also where residents take the podium themselves — presenting research, interesting cases, and ongoing projects throughout the year.

Residents also have access to TrueLearn, a question bank with practice questions aligned to the ABA In-Training, BASIC, and Advanced exams, complete with performance analytics and national benchmarking to track your progress along the way.

We also provide access to the Anesthesia Toolbox, a collaborative library of e-learning modules, quizzes, podcasts, simulation scripts, and procedural guides developed and peer-reviewed by anesthesiology departments across the country.