Virginia Commonwealth University Health System Program

Program Identity & Fit

VCU's 0+5 Integrated Vascular Surgery Residency is a tertiary academic program built on a legacy dating to one of the nation's first accredited vascular fellowships, training residents across a high-volume, complex referral base at VCU Medical Center (an 845-bed Level 1 trauma center with hybrid endovascular ORs and the region's busiest vascular lab) and the Central Virginia VA Health System. The curriculum is deliberately efficient for a five-year track, pairing a mentorship model (two assigned attendings per resident) that builds early autonomy with wet-lab/cadaveric and high-fidelity endovascular simulation, and off-service rotations (transplant, cardiothoracic, IR, trauma) chosen specifically to build open and endovascular skill rather than generic exposure. Research is flexible rather than mandatory—no dedicated research year—but robust infrastructure exists (departmental statistician, registries like VASQIP/NSQIP/VQI, aortic tissue bank, industry trials) for residents who want to pursue it, and graduates consistently enter vascular fellowship-adjacent or direct vascular practice. The program explicitly seeks applicants who have shown initiative and achievement and can withstand the intensity of a compressed subspecialty pathway, valuing technical trajectory and resilience over breadth of unrelated interests.