A residency you tune to your own career.
Forty-eight months. Six clinical sites. A Career Development Track that you start in PGY-1 and refine through PGY-4. Below: how the curriculum is structured, what each year looks like, and the substance behind simulation, research, and wellness.
This four-year Emergency Medicine Residency program has received Initial Accreditation status by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). This four-year program fulfills the training requirements defined by the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM). Graduates are eligible to take the ABEM Qualifying Exam and subsequent Certification Exam.
Four years of progressive responsibility, anchored in the Mayo Clinic Arizona ED and broadened across five partner sites in the Phoenix metro. PGY-1 builds the off-service foundation through critical care, anesthesia, orthopedics, ultrasound, and EMS. PGY-2 takes ownership of the resuscitation bay and adds trauma SICU at St. Joseph’s, obstetrics and toxicology at Banner-Phoenix, and stroke neurology at Mayo. PGY-3 and PGY-4 carry team leadership, the senior selectives that bend the program toward your intended practice, and rotation at HuHuKam Memorial in the Gila River Indian Community.
Emergency Medicine Core Conference is held every Wednesday morning, 7 a.m. to 12 p.m., with protected attendance during all EM rotations. Residents receive at least 240 hours of synchronous didactic content per year, structured around the ABEM Emergency Medicine Model — case-based teaching, simulation, journal club, procedural workshops, and board review.
CDTs run longitudinally across all four years. Each track pairs you with a faculty mentor, a scholarly project, and eleven weeks of protected time — three weeks of CDT selective in PGY-2, four weeks of CDT elective in PGY-3, and four weeks of CDT elective in PGY-4. Roughly twenty-five percent of CDT elective time is protected for scholarly work.
- Administration
- Critical Care Medicine
- Emergency Medical Services (EMS)
- Global Health
- Integrative Medicine
- Medical Education
- Palliative Care Medicine
- Pediatrics
- Research
- Sports Medicine
- Toxicology / Addiction Medicine
- Ultrasound
- Wilderness Medicine
Don’t see what you want? Residents can propose and develop new tracks with the program director and a faculty mentor.
Six health systems, forty-mile radius. By graduation, you will have practiced in every setting an emergency physician can be asked to walk into.
Primary site
Mayo Clinic Arizona
Tertiary academic medical center. 62-bed ED with three major resuscitation bays. Comprehensive Stroke Center, STEMI receiving center, LVAD and heart transplant program.
Pediatric emergency medicine
Phoenix Children's Hospital
Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center. Main campus 68-bed ED, 100,000+ pediatric visits per year. Arrowhead community campus for high-volume general pediatrics.
County safety net
Valleywise Health Medical Center
Level 1 trauma center. Arizona's only nationally recognized Burn Center. Maricopa County's safety-net hospital, with its own ACGME-accredited EM residency.
Trauma & neuroemergency
St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center
Level 1 trauma center in central Phoenix. Home of Barrow Neurological Institute, world-renowned for neurosciences.
Toxicology & obstetrics
Banner University Medical Center – Phoenix
Tertiary academic teaching hospital and Level 1 trauma center. Renowned medical toxicology center with its own admitting service from observation through ICU. High-volume labor and delivery.
Rural & underserved
HuHuKam Memorial Hospital
Part of Gila River Health Care (GRHC), a tribal-run healthcare network serving the Gila River Indian Community south of the Phoenix metro. Rural, resource-limited emergency care; cultural-sensitivity training and a Gila River EMS ride-along included.
Senior residents take additional four-week selectives at Mayo Clinic emergency departments in Rochester, Minnesota and Jacksonville, Florida; Indian Health Services Rural EM at Winslow Indian Health Care Center / Dilkon in Northern Arizona; and St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. Three Mayo campuses, six health systems, your residency.
Block schedules with four-week rotations. Conference Wednesday mornings, protected. Four weeks of paid vacation each year. Wellness time is scheduled, not earned. Annual program-paid attendance at one major national conference per PGY-2 through PGY-4 year:
PGY-1 to PGY-4
Presenter-supported travel
Mayo funds travel and lodging for any resident accepted to present at a regional, national, or international conference (SAEM, AAEM, ACEP, CORD, AzCEP)
Rising Chief PGY-3
CORD
Council of Residency Directors Academic Assembly
PGY-4
ACEP
ACEP Scientific Assembly
Reps, when you need them.
Emergency medicine is procedural, time-pressured, and unforgiving of hesitation. The Mayo Clinic Arizona Simulation Center is designed to remove the gap between learning a skill and using one.
High-fidelity adult and pediatric mannequins. A dedicated ultrasound bay. Task trainers for ultrasound-guided vascular access, lumbar puncture, central lines, and airway management including video laryngoscopy and surgical airway. Cadaver labs for advanced procedural training and anatomy review. Interdisciplinary scenarios with nursing, pharmacy, trauma surgery, and other teams.
In-situ simulation runs inside the emergency department itself, in the same bays where you treat patients. Just-in-time training is available on shift: when a procedure walks through the door, the equipment and the teaching are minutes away. Live ultrasound education is built into the workflow, with QR-code access in every doctor workarea to image libraries and teaching modules you can pull up between patients. The intent is simple: when you graduate, the skills you practiced in simulation should feel indistinguishable from the ones you practiced in the trauma bay.
A program with the time, money, and infrastructure for real questions.
Mayo Clinic’s research culture is one of the things its name is built on. That culture extends to residents here, with intentional support: dedicated project funding for residents, supportive IRB processes, and faculty who actively co-author with trainees.
Residents have direct access to institutional data warehouses and electronic health record datasets, support from quantitative health sciences (statisticians and data analysts), and collaboration with the Mayo Clinic Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery. The work covers the breadth of emergency medicine — case reports and image series, quality improvement and operations research, prospective original studies, multicenter collaborations, and funded investigations.
Each resident completes and disseminates a scholarly project — a peer-reviewed publication, a national or international presentation or workshop, a book chapter, a published QI project — with twenty-five percent of CDT elective time protected for the work. Whatever question you bring with you, there is a mentor, a budget, and a path to publication.
A four-year program shouldn’t take four years off your life.
Wellness here is not a wellness committee. It is the schedule, the staffing, the culture, and the people.
Every resident is paired with a wellness mentor who stays with them across all four years. The mentorship arc moves through orientation, skill building, leadership development, and ultimately launch and legacy — anchored in the program’s belief that career fulfillment and personal well-being are inseparable. Family is part of the program: partners and children are invited to milestones, included in communications, and welcomed into the cohort. Once a year, the Emergency Medicine and Critical Care services open the ED for a family day — spouses run simulated procedures, kids see the workplace their parent disappears into for shifts, and the people who support you get to see what they’ve been supporting.
The staff supports you. The schedule respects you. Four weeks of paid vacation a year, an annual resident retreat, and a 24/7 resident lounge. The program intends for you to leave residency more whole than you arrived.