I spent the month of January 2017 in the ICU at St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula, which was awesome.

The work: St. Pat’s is different than many other WWAMI locations I’ve heard about, it is still in a rural setting but is actually a level II trauma center and provides a fair amount of specialty care, so a lot of patients get flown there from the surrounding smaller hospitals. This means the ICU takes care of a wide variety of medical, trauma/surgical, and neuro patients. The ICU team is more focused on the medical patients, but you can get involved with the others if you’re interested in getting more experience with these patient populations in the critical care setting. The attendings were all great to work with and motivated to help you get procedures, and there was ample opportunity to do them. I spent a day in the OR with a couple different anesthesiologists and got some concentrated time doing intubations, which was set up for me by one of the ICU attendings when I asked to do it. There is a family medicine residency program there and medical students from UW, so there are conferences during the week and they ask you to present a journal club and a morning report, which was fun.

The fun: Missoula is  like a mini-Seattle. There’s tons of great outdoors activities, numerous breweries, and a nice downtown area with some good restaurants. In general, if you like Seattle and Seattle-type things, you will love Missoula.

Overall, highly recommended!