Director's Message
I am delighted to announce the inauguration of the UND/Sanford Surgical Critical Care Fellowship with our first fellow starting in August of 2026.
This one-year ACGME-accredited fellowship program is a partnership between the University of North Dakota and the Sanford Health System, who are united in the common goal of providing access to world-class health care in rural settings.
Fellows will benefit from training at Sanford Health in Fargo, the largest teaching hospital within the UND SMHS system. In addition, we are proud to serve our region as the only Level One Adult Trauma Center and the only Pediatric Trauma Center in North Dakota. Because we serve as a tertiary referral center for four states (Montana, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota) across a 400-mile footprint, we see a wide variety of traumatic injuries, complex surgical issues, and surgical patients with complex neurological and cardiovascular problems. Our close partnership with the UND/Sanford Cardiovascular Fellowship, the Medical ICU, and the Neurovascular ICU permits our fellows to have broad training across the spectrum of surgical critical care.
We are committed to the personal and professional development of each fellow we are privileged to train. The academic program consists of forty-eight weeks of conferences, case discussions, simulation training, and journal clubs, with protected time for these educational experiences. Membership and participation in the major professional organizations (including EAST, SCCM, AAST) is strongly encouraged and the fellow will receive support to attend two conferences during the fellowship year.
Our fellows will graduate from the UND/Sanford program with extensive experience in resuscitation and management of critically ill and injured patients. The surgical ICU team includes surgical residents, pharmacy residents, and medical students; this provides the fellow the opportunity to manage an interdisciplinary team. Each fellow will receive hands-on training from seven board-certified surgical intensivists, as well as the opportunity to take independent acute care surgery night call with immediate backup from any one of our ten trauma/acute care surgeons.
Our goal is to train the next generation of trauma/acute care surgeons and surgical intensivists for trauma centers and critical access hospitals in rural locations. We are looking for surgeons who share our passion for rural health care, and who are hoping to practice in the same kind of small towns where they grew up.
If you have any questions regarding the fellowship or the application process, please feel free to reach out to our Program Administrator, Lauren Blake, MPA. We look forward to meeting you and welcoming you to our UND/Sanford family.
Sincerely,
Sheryl M. Sahr, M.D., M.S., FACS
Program Director, UND/Sanford Surgical Critical Care Fellowship
Medical Director, Surgical Intensive Care Unit
Sanford Medical Center Fargo