About Us

Kaweah Delta Health Care District (KDHCD) is the primary site of the surgery program. KDHCD is the only hospital in Visalia, a city of over 130,000 people, and with its 581 registered acute care beds is the largest one in the county of Tulare. The county has a population of more than 440,000, and registered a 20% increase between 2000 and 2010.

In 2013 the full-service hospital registered 26,396 admissions and over 4,000 deliveries, with an average daily census in excess of 400 patients. KDHCD is also the primary site of ACGME-accredited residency programs in Family Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Psychiatry, Anesthesiology, and Transitional Year. KDHCD has a total 14 operating rooms and a surgical volume of over 14,000 procedures a year, of which over 4,000 are inpatient cases. Four new operating rooms came online in 2009 and include 3 rooms with extensive physiologic monitoring capabilities and a state-of-the-art hybrid room for endovascular procedures. Approximately 8,000 endoscopies were performed in the KDHCD’s endoscopy suite in the course of 2013. KDHCD operates the only trauma center in the county of Tulare. Every year, KDHCD Emergency Department evaluates and treats over 90,000 patients with more than 1,000 trauma activations.

To respond to the growing health care needs of the area it serves and because of its commitment to graduate medical education, KDHCD continues to make substantial investments to further upgrade its capabilities. The appointment of a full time surgical faculty of 6, the completion of a heliport and the extensive expansion of its emergency department that took place over the last four years exemplify the magnitude of those investments.

The Fresno Veteran Affairs (VA) Medical Center serves as an integrated site of the program. Nearly 1,800 surgical procedures were performed at the site last year. Approximately 1,000 of the operations involved essential content areas of general surgery, and the institution is actively expanding its minimally invasive thoracic and bariatric capabilities. The VA rotation augments the clinical experience of the residents in some of the essential content areas of surgery as it provides not only a substantial increase in volume and variety of the cases, but also an opportunity to manage and deliver the continuum of surgical care in a population with unique demographics and within a complex integrated system.

KDHCD surgery program provides the bulk of the volume and breadth of the necessary operative experience in general surgery at its primary and integrated sites, and each graduating resident will perform between 850 and 1,000 cases as a the primary surgeon, and at least 250 by the end of the second year of training.

Specific outside rotations have been arranged through program letters of agreement with the appropriate sites to give the residents exposure to specialized content areas, such as pediatric surgery at the Valley Children's Hospital in Madera, and transplantation, burns, and hepatic, biliary and pancreatic surgery at University of California, Irvine Medical Center in Orange.