About Us

Kaweah Health (Kaweah Health) is the primary site of the surgery program and the only hospital in Visalia, a city of over 130,000 people, and with its 581 registered acute care beds is the largest one in the county of Tulare. The county has a population of more than 440,000, with a 20% increase between 2000 and 2010.

The full-service hospital has nearly 30,000 admissions and 5,000 deliveries per year, with an average daily census in excess of 400 patients. Kaweah Health is also the primary site of ACGME-accredited residency programs in Family Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Psychiatry, Anesthesiology, and Transitional Year.

Kaweah Health has a total of 14 operating rooms, which include three rooms with extensive physiologic monitoring capabilities and a state-of-the-art hybrid room for endovascular procedures. Two brand new trauma operating rooms came online in 2017. In 2020 Kaweah acquired a new DaVinci Xi surgical system including a training console that will enable the completion of a robotic skills curriculum by residents who are interested in that aspect of surgery.

Surgical volume is over 14,000 procedures a year, over 4,000 of them on inpatients. Approximately 8,000 endoscopies were performed in the Kaweah Health’s endoscopy suite last year. Kaweah Health operates the only trauma center in the counties of Tulare and Kings, serving a combined population of nearly 600,000. Every year, Kaweah Health Emergency Department evaluates and treats over 90,000 patients with more than 1,000 trauma activations.

To respond to the growing health care needs of the area it serves and because of its commitment to graduate medical education, Kaweah Health continues to make substantial investments to further upgrade its capabilities. The appointment of a core surgical faculty of 7 and a recent massive expansion of its emergency department exemplify the magnitude of those investments.

Kaweah Health surgery program provides the bulk of the volume and breadth of the necessary operative experience in general surgery at its primary site, and each graduating resident will have performed in excess of 1,000 cases as a the primary surgeon, including a substantial number of basic and advanced minimally invasive and robotic procedures.

Outside rotations have been arranged through program letters of agreement with the appropriate sites to give the residents exposure to specialized content areas, such as pediatric surgery at the Valley Children's Hospital in Madera, and transplantation, burns, and hepatic, biliary and pancreatic surgery at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center in Orange. The program provides housing for the residents at all the rotation sites.