VTCSOM seeks to create neurosurgery department

Administrators at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine are working toward establishing a department of neurosurgery, a step up from its smaller program.

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) received the school’s proposal for creating the new department in early August and could vote on it as soon as Oct. 24, according to Joseph DeFilippo, director of academic affairs for the state’s coordinating body for higher education.

In June, the Virginia Tech board of visitors approved the plan to seek SCHEV’s approval for the creation of the neurosurgery department, a move that would see Tech’s medical school joining the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University in teaching the discipline.

The department wouldn’t start from scratch; Tech’s current neurosurgery program is housed under the surgery department. A larger neurosurgery department also would benefit from the recent expansion of Carilion Clinic’s neurosurgery department, which will provide faculty members skilled in current technology. And students would work with researchers at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and the Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience.

Carilion Clinic elevated its neurosurgery program, which was launched in 2003, to a department in June when Dr. John Jane Jr. joined Carilion Clinic as the health system’s first chair of neurosurgery. “Most neurosurgery groups are departments within hospitals,” Jane explains. The new department also aligns with greater demand for neurosurgeons. 

As the U.S. population ages, more neurosurgeons will be needed, according to Dr. Nicholas Marko, director of neurosurgery at LewisGale Regional Health System in Salem. Elderly patients are subject to conditions like subdural hematomas treated by neurosurgeons.

Only a few weeks after Marko’s 2019 arrival at LewisGale, his office was “booking patients faster than we could possibly see them,” he says. 

Jane currently serves as a professor of surgery at VTCSOM but would become chair of neurosurgery there if the new department is approved by SCHEV, according to a Carilion Clinic spokesperson.

During the 2021-22 school year, the VTC School of Medicine received a total of 245 applications for one post-medical school residency in neurosurgery, according to a background document provided to Virginia Tech’s board. Establishing a neurosurgery department, the document explained, will allow the medical school to offer additional neurosurgery residency slots.

“We certainly have the need and the volume to increase our residency training program,” Jane says.