Our Urology Residency was established in the late 1940’s by Dr. Robert K. Womack, with Dr. Burdette (Burt) Trichel taking over as Chairman in 1962. This preceded the opening of the LSU Health Shreveport School of Medicine, which accepted its first class of 32 students in September of 1969. Since then, the Urology Residency Program has enjoyed an uninterrupted period of accreditation and a legacy of outstanding clinical training.

The residents spend at least six months annually on the primary clinical service which is headquartered at the Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport Academic Medical Center. This site is home to a Level 1 Trauma Center and serves as a major tertiary medical referral center for the northern half of Louisiana, East Texas, and Southern Arkansas. Residents obtain experience in general urology, pediatric urology, female/reconstructive urology, urologic oncology, minimally invasive surgery/robotics, and endourology. The hospital has dual console, da Vinci Xi robots, while the outpatient clinical facilities are equipped with state-of-the-art fluoroscopic tables, ultrasonography, and videourodynamic equipment.

The training program also utilizes the nearby Overton Brooks Veterans Affairs Medical Center, which is supervised by the full-time Urology faculty. While the traditional focus here has been on mastering open surgery, the VA is now the home of a new dual console da Vinci Xi.

The residents additionally rotate on the Urology service maintained at the Willis Knighton Health System Hospitals — a full-service, private health care system also equipped with multiple da Vinci robots – utilizing a “one-on-one” mentorship model. Finally, formal rotations based at the Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport - St. Mary Medical Center and the Regional Urology campus are in the planning stages.