Emergency Medicine Residency Program

Welcome from the Program Director

Dear Prospective Residents,

Welcome to the Methodist Healthcare System of San Antonio Emergency Medicine Residency Program. I am delighted that you are considering our program as the place to begin your career in Emergency Medicine.

Emergency medicine is a remarkable specialty. We meet patients and families during some of the most difficult and consequential moments of their lives. We are asked to make important decisions with limited information, perform lifesaving procedures, lead multidisciplinary teams, and remain compassionate in an environment where the unexpected is routine. It is a specialty that demands clinical knowledge, procedural skill, sound judgment, teamwork, and leadership.

We have built our residency around those principles.

Our mission is to develop highly skilled, compassionate emergency physicians who are prepared to excel in fast-paced, high-acuity clinical environments and ultimately care for any patient, with any emergency, in any environment. Our educational program emphasizes exceptional clinical experience, evidence-based medicine, procedural excellence, progressive autonomy, mentorship, scholarship, and leadership.

An Exceptional Clinical Training Environment

The clinical home of our residency is Methodist Hospital, an 811-bed tertiary acute-care hospital in San Antonio's South Texas Medical Center. Its Adult Emergency Department cares for more than 70,000 patients annually, with more than 20,000 requiring hospital admission—providing our residents substantial exposure to high-acuity and medically complex emergency care. The hospital's advanced capabilities include comprehensive stroke care, heart transplantation, trauma care, and the region's largest ECMO program.

Our residents also receive extensive pediatric emergency training at Methodist Children's Hospital throughout all three years of residency. The Children's Emergency Department sees more than 42,000 pediatric patients annually and includes 40 private emergency treatment rooms. Residents additionally train in a 24-bed PICU and within a children's hospital offering a 94-bed Level IV NICU and advanced pediatric subspecialty care.

But one hospital cannot represent every environment in which an emergency physician will eventually practice. For that reason, we intentionally created a diverse clinical training network.

At Methodist Hospital Metropolitan, residents experience a busy urban and community emergency department with more than 55,500 annual visits and progressively assume greater responsibility for resuscitation, procedures, patient flow, clinical decision-making, and departmental leadership. Dedicated trauma training occurs at St. David's South Austin Medical Center, a 368-bed Level II Trauma Center with a Shock Trauma Intensive Care Unit.

Our curriculum extends even further through longitudinal EMS experience and extensive critical care training, including the PICU, MICU, cardiovascular ICU, surgical ICU, neurological/surgical ICU, and lung and respiratory critical care—including ECMO.

Education, Mentorship and Leadership

Clinical volume alone does not create an outstanding emergency physician. Great residency training requires deliberate education, graduated responsibility, meaningful feedback, and faculty who are genuinely invested in the development of their residents.

Our dedicated Graduate Medical Education space supports simulation, didactics, procedural training, and resident education. Residents participate in structured simulation for critical resuscitations and high-risk procedures, while emergency ultrasound is incorporated longitudinally throughout training.

I am particularly proud of the faculty we have assembled. They bring expertise in Emergency Medicine, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Emergency Ultrasound, EMS, Disaster Medicine, Trauma, Critical Care, and scholarly activity. Many have extensive experience teaching residents at established Emergency Medicine programs, including the San Antonio Uniformed Services Health Education Consortium at Brooke Army Medical Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Our faculty includes the immediate past President of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine – Dr. Robert Frolichstein and the internationally acclaimed speaker and founder of the internationally acclaimed FOAM website RebelEM.com – Dr. Salim Rezaie. Dr. Gillan Schmitz, former President of the American College of Emergency Physicians, previously worked with our program.

Our goal is not simply to help you complete residency.

Our goal is to help you become the physician whom your colleagues want standing beside them when the department is at its busiest and the patient is at their sickest.

A Remarkable City to Call Home

Residency is also three years of your life, and we believe where you live matters.

San Antonio is an extraordinary place to call home.

With more than 1.5 million residents, San Antonio combines the opportunities and amenities of one of America's largest cities with a distinctive sense of community. The city offers the 15-mile River Walk, the Pearl, professional sports, outstanding restaurants, live music, museums, extensive greenway trails, and easy access to the Texas Hill Country.

San Antonio's history and culture are equally distinctive. It is home to Texas's only UNESCO World Heritage Site, encompassing the San Antonio Missions, and has been recognized as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy for its remarkable culinary heritage.

It is a city where you can work in a major tertiary medical center and, after your shift, be on the River Walk, at the Pearl, attending a Spurs game, running or cycling on the city's more than 100 miles of greenway trails, or heading into the Hill Country.

An Opportunity to Build Something Extraordinary

Perhaps what excites me most about our program is something that cannot be captured by patient volumes, rotation schedules, or facilities.

We are building something new.

There is a unique opportunity that comes with joining a new residency program. You do not simply inherit traditions established by the residents who came before you.

You help create them.

Our inaugural residents will have the opportunity to help define the culture, traditions, identity, and ultimately the legacy of this program. We are looking for residents who embrace that opportunity—physicians who are curious, hardworking, compassionate, collaborative, and ready to lead.

We want residents who seek rigorous clinical training but also want to contribute something of themselves to the program they join. We want people who will challenge us to continually improve, support their fellow residents, serve our patients and community, and eventually become leaders within our specialty.

If that describes what you are looking for in Emergency Medicine residency training, I invite you to explore our program and learn more about the opportunities available at Methodist Healthcare.

I hope you will consider joining us in San Antonio.

Come train with us. Come lead with us. And come help us build something extraordinary.