Christopher Kinnard, M.D., named USA Surgical Critical Care fellowship director
In this new role, Kinnard is responsible for overseeing the entire fellowship program, including implementing changes based on current accreditation requirements.
Known for his passion for teaching, Christopher Kinnard, M.D., has been selected as the new USA Surgical Critical Care fellowship director starting with the 2020-2021 class.
Kinnard is a trauma and emergency general surgeon for USA Health and assistant professor of surgery with the University of South Alabama College of Medicine. He was chosen as fellowship director by Jon Simmons, M.D., chief of trauma, burns, & acute care surgery, following the retirement of Sidney Brevard, M.D., professor of surgery.
“Dr. Brevard has done an excellent job at making this fellowship an outstanding training program and his leadership will certainly be missed,” Simmons said. “Dr. Kinnard was an obvious choice to be the new fellowship director because of his enthusiasm for teaching. In addition to being an excellent surgeon, Dr. Kinnard possesses a large knowledge of trauma and surgical critical care and his vision for creating a flexible curriculum to meet the needs of each individual fellow is truly innovative.”
In this new role, Kinnard is responsible for overseeing the entire fellowship program, including implementing changes based on current accreditation requirements. He is also responsible for recruitment and ensuring the curriculum includes the most up-to-date, evidence-based critical care training.
Kinnard said one of the unique qualities about the fellowship program at USA is how it can be customized to the specific career goals of the fellow. Fellows are allowed to customize their own curriculum as long as it stays within Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requirements. Another benefit of the USA program is that fellows get much more individual attention than they would in a larger fellowship “ensuring that the experience that a fellow gets here is not diluted,” Kinnard said.
One of Kinnard’s long-term goals for the program is to provide fellows with a robust critical care experience, and with upcoming expansions to USA Health, he said, this is an exciting time for the fellows who come here.
“We are rapidly expanding as a health care system,” Kinnard said. “The administration has been forward thinking on how to expand and improve medical care to this region, making now an exciting time to be a part of USA Health.”
To be fellowship director, a surgeon must be board certified in general surgery and surgical critical care and be a director or co-director of the surgical intensive care unit.
