We invite you to consider the advantages of a program that will expose you to:
The accomplishments of our fellowship graduates demonstrate our commitment to help you develop the necessary skills to succeed in your career endeavors. The Blood Banking/Transfusion Medicine Fellowship Program gives fellows a broad comprehensive background in blood banking and transfusion medicine and provides opportunities to gain experience in donor collections, infectious disease testing, immunohematology, therapeutics, progenitor cell collections, and tissue banking.
In training fellows, the Department strives to produce excellent practitioners. We also want our fellows to learn to be good teachers and to acquire a critical and inquiring approach not only to diagnostics, but to investigating the unsolved problems of pathology. We believe at the completion of training, graduates of the University of Iowa Department of Pathology are prepared for the challenges ahead and can look forward to the fulfillment that comes from pursuing a career that fosters life-long education.
There are fellowships available in surgical pathology, cytopathology, hematopathology, microbiology, blood/bank transfusion medicine, and molecular pathology.
Fellows have 15 weekday vacation days a year. Professional leave for meetings is negotiated on an individual basis. Leave is granted for National Board exams and American Board of Pathology exams but not for board preparation courses. For job interviews or board preparation courses, each house staff member will be allowed five working days of leave. Additional days taken for job interviews or board preparation courses must use vacation.
Each fellow is given $1500/year for books/journals, meetings or memberships. Travel to national conferences is paid for by the department for fellows presenting abstracts.
The established reputation of excellence in training at the University of Iowa, combined with the recent trend of increasing demand and aging of current pathologists, has meant a tremendous opportunity for fellows from our program. All departing fellows in recent years have had no difficulty getting offers for desirable positions in both academic and private settings.
The fellow is on call (from home) 5 PM – 8 AM Sunday through Thursday. The first call for transfusion medicine questions and procedures is covered by 2nd to 4th year Pathology residents who have done a transfusion medicine rotation, and the fellow is second call. A transfusion medicine faculty member is always also on call as backup to the fellow.
The Blood Bank/Transfusion Medicine Fellowship at UI Hospitals & Clinics is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Information specific to program requirements for a pathology training program may be found at the ACGME’s Pathology Residency Review Committee.
Fifty weeks of hospital based transfusion medicine and donor center training, including 2 one –week periods of offsite training in infectious disease testing and HLA. Our on-site training provides daily involvement with donor center operations, RBC and platelet serology testing, and an active apheresis service providing support for all areas of our tertiary care facility including hematology, renal, cardiology and pulmonary services of internal medicine and pediatrics, as well as obstetrics, stem cell and solid organ transplant services.
Name of Conference |
Frequency |
| Morning Report | Week Days |
| Antibody/Transfusion Reaction/Irradiated Product Signout | Bi-weekly |
| Blood Club | Weekly |
| Blood & Marrow Transplant Program Pre-Transplant Meeting | Weekly |
| Clinical Pathology Morning Report | Weekly |
| DeGowin Blood Center Administrative Staff Meeting | Weekly |
| Pathology Grand Rounds | Weekly |
| Resident Didactic/Presentation | Weekly |
| Transfusion Medicine/Hematopathology Conference | Weekly |
| Blood & Marrow Transplant Journal Club | Monthly |
| Transfusion Medicine Journal Club | Monthly |
| Transfusion Subcommittee | Monthly |
Pathology has historically been defined by the intersection of laboratory science and clinical medicine. Each new advancement in science that has had an impact on diagnostic medicine has spawned a new area of "laboratory medicine", from the application of light microscopy to immunohistochemistry, from serology to flow cytometry, and molecular genetics. In order for a pathology department to lead, and not just follow, it must create and maintain "germinal centers" of those sciences related to human biology and pathobiology. This difficult and fragile process is called "research". It is the strength of our Pathology Department that this process has happened in the past. We are fully committed to its continuation.
An optional second year of fellowship may be devoted to research in any of several areas under faculty mentorship.