Overview

The one-year Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine Fellowship offers an outstanding experience that includes patient management and teaching of residents. The program supports two fellows per year and can be tailored to meet the fellows' educational goals.

Curriculum

Fellows gain experience in a wide range of skills associated with regional anesthesiology, utilizing state of the art ultrasound guided techniques to perform single shot and catheter blocks. Nerve catheter management includes patients that have ambulatory catheters at home. Additionally, our inpatient pain service provides care for patients across the entire hospital and offers multimodal management which includes ketamine and lidocaine infusions. We prepare trainees to evaluate pertinent literature, develop and conduct original research projects, and present their work at national and international academic meetings.

Each fellow will personally perform and supervise residents in more than 1,000 blocks during the fellowship year, including upper and lower extremity catheters as well as paravertebral and truncal blocks. They have ample opportunities to become educators through point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) and simulation.

Forty percent of fellow time is spent in a clinical instructor role, doing a mix of general operating room cases. This allows the fellow to maintain their clinical anesthesiology skills, as well as make supplemental income. Each fellow receives professional funds for conferences, books and additional academic endeavors.

Admission

The regional anesthesia fellowship common application form is available through the San Francisco Match portal.  

To provide more consistency and predictability to the RAAPM fellowship application process, nearly 60 RAAAPM fellowship programs have decided to participate in a common application and match process provided by SF Match for recruitment. Virginia Commonwealth University is proud to be one of these programs participating in this new match process for the upcoming interview season for the 2025-2026 Academic year.

This matching process, provided by SF match, analogous to the current match system for trainees in Cardiac, Critical Care, and Obstetric Anesthesiology, will allow fellowship applicants an opportunity to visit and evaluate various training programs systematically over a larger window of time. This resulting match system will improve the equity of the process, create a more flexible and comprehensive interview process, and benefit both applicants and individual programs.

Applicants will have to register with and apply to our program through the SF Match website below. SF Match will be the central site involved in processing applications, accepting rank lists, processing of the match itself, as well as providing post-match vacancy matching.    

1. Application Portal opens in January 2024
2. Locate program(s) of interest using the ASRA Fellowship Directory
3. Register as an applicant to Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain Medicine (RAAPM) Fellowship on SFMatch.org.
4. Complete the RAAPM application documents within the SF Match system.
5. Locate program(s) of interest using the ASRA Fellowship Directory
6. Programs will set up interviews once applications are received via SF Match portal.
7. Note all pertinent deadline dates for your application cycle on SF Match website, or the ASRA RAAPM Fellowship Page.
8. Submit rank list before deadline date.
9. In some cases, you may be eligible to commit to a program with an exception agreement, after registration on SF Match. These agreements are initiated by the program director and not the applicant. 
10. Obtain match results on date published by SF Match.

Contacts:

Michael Buxhoeveden, M.D., fellowship program director (michael.buxhoeveden@vcuhealth.org)

Evan Marmerstein, fellowship program coordinator (evan.marmerstein@vcuhealth.org)

Mailing Address:
1200 E. Broad Street, 7th Floor
Box 980695
Richmond, VA 23298-0695