Clinical Experience

The vision of the Pediatric Epilepsy Fellowship at Children's Mercy Kansas City is to provide the fellow with the educational, clinical and research experience he/she needs to deliver the highest quality of care to epilepsy patients. 

The Epilepsy Fellowship at Children's Mercy is an ACGME-accredited one-year exclusive pediatric epilepsy program that focuses on developing the skills of interpreting electroencephalogram (EEG), and evaluation/treatment of epilepsy across the pediatric spectrum including children requiring epilepsy surgery, VNS implantation, and ketogenic diet therapy. The program is provided through collaboration between Children's Mercy and the University of Kansas Medical Center. As part of the ACGME requirement, fellows also gain an opportunity to obtain adult epilepsy experience for one month at the University of Kansas Medical Center. On completion of the fellowship, our fellows are eligible to take the board certification exams in Epilepsy from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN).

Children’s Mercy sees a large variety of medically controlled, medically refractory, and non-epileptic patients in addition to a full range of generalized and focal epilepsies in a tertiary referral center. The volume of both surgical and critical care EEG monitoring is growing exponentially and will be more than adequate for educational needs. 

This Epilepsy Fellowship will provide a comprehensive clinical and didactic education that focuses on all stages of pediatric epilepsy care as well as non-epileptic patients. A robust educational program for the Epilepsy Fellowship training will be available to Epilepsy Fellows, neurology/neurosurgery Residents as well as rotating clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy Fellows from KUMC. 

The early portion of the Fellowship will be spent on learning to read EEG (both short term and long term) with emphasis placed on correlating those findings into the clinical care of patients. The next step in their education will be learning management of surgical epilepsy patients in the pre-surgical, surgical and post-surgical time frames.

Furthermore, the Fellow will participate on the inpatient epilepsy consultation service and will also have their own continuity clinic every week which will help them in acquiring clinical skills as well as gaining independence in their clinical decision making. Epilepsy Fellows will have opportunities to supplement education from epilepsy faculty for clinical education to neurology Residents during their epilepsy rotations.

Modalities for the work up of patients for epilepsy surgery include: intraoperative ECoG, invasive monitoring with depth and subdural electrodes, cortical brain mapping, minimally invasive epilepsy surgery with laser, sEEG acquisition is underway, positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), magnetoencephalography (MEG in acquisition), fMRI and WADA. 

The faculty’s differing educational backgrounds will provide overlapping viewpoints which will improve the educational experience of our pediatric Epilepsy Fellow. Epilepsy faculty engage in research that is accessible and clinically relevant to Fellow clinical and educational experiences.