Welcome to the Ascension St. John Surgical Residency website. This website is intended to introduce you to the people and hospital behind the residency program. We are an independent academic program that graduates five residents a year. We aim to develop competent and compassionate surgeons that engender respect and trust among patients and their families. In the past few years, our residents have secured fellowships in many prestigious institutions. Our graduates can be found as surgical leaders in communities all over the country. We are proud of all of them.

Ascension St. John Hospital offers a five-year residency training program in General Surgery. The hospital is a 600-bed teaching facility that includes 66 intensive care beds. The surgical program is oriented to meet the requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the American College of Surgeons and the American Board of Surgery.

The goal of the residency is to train ethical, competent, board-certified General Surgeons, who can change with the times and lead in personalized surgical care in the communities they serve especially for those most in need. In simple words, we aim to train operating general surgeons capable of independent surgical practice in rural Michigan. In keeping with the times, fellowship match rates are also robust and in multiple specialties. 

Unique aspects of the program are that it is a fully contained program. All specialities required for graduation including Transplant and Pediatric surgery  are covered in the parent hospital with no need for outside rotations to complete the curriculum. Our graduating residents complete their entire operative experience by January of their chief year. The resident experience on many rotations is a fellowship level experience as there are no surgical subspecialty fellows. There are very few programs in the country where a chief resident would close a PDA, do a complex thoracic aortic replacement and a major liver resection all in the same week.

The hospital is situated at the border of Grosse Pointe and Detroit. Our location allows us to serve a diverse population and varied disease processes. A typical day for a surgical resident could involve caring for a gunshot victim to an elderly cancer patient. 

The Department of Surgery has been at the forefront of surgical technological changes over the past few decades. The first laparoscopic cholecystectomy in Michigan was performed in our operating rooms. We were also amongst the first hospitals in the nation to do Aortic stent grafts and the pride of our Surgical Oncology department is our HIPEC program that leads the Midwest in innovation. We expect all our graduating residents to be certified on the Da Vinci Robotic system. 

Our residents come predominantly from the Midwest and we currently have more women than men in the program. The faculty are diverse with subspecialty training in all required subspecialities for resident education.