Internal Medicine Residency Program

The Cooper Campus

On August 11th 1887, Cooper Hospital admitted its first medical patient, a 23-year-old male laborer, with an intermittent fever. In the prior month, the hospital board had appointed a medical staff to serve the hospital: four physicians, three surgeons, one pathologist, and two resident physicians. In the first four months of service in 1887, Cooper Hospital admitted 165 medical patients for an average of length of stay of 19.3 days per patient. A reported 663 outpatient medical cases were treated during the initial four-month period of hospital operations.

One hundred and twenty years later, Cooper University Hospital presents a dramatically different scope of medical care. Now, it is a 526-bed, nonprofit academic medical center that provides tertiary health care services for South Jersey region. It is the clinical campus for the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Highlights Include:

  • Most comprehensive academic medical center in South Jersey. In the academic year of 2006-2007 in the Department of Medicine alone, 165 full- and part-time physicians are now employed. Of these physicians, 57 are primary care physicians and hospitalists, and 107 are physicians who practice in eleven different sub-specialties.
  • Level 1 regional trauma center
  • Only winner of National Research Corporation Consumer Choice Award in Delaware Valley for three consecutive year from 2005 to 2007
  • Was designated as one of ten model clinical campuses by American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) in 2003
  • Voted one of the “Best Places to Work” by Philadelphia Business Journal 2007
  • Southern New Jersey’s major tertiary-care referral hospital for specialized services. These regional services include, among others: Level I Southern New Jersey Regional Trauma Center; The Cancer Institute of New Jersey at Cooper; Tertiary level Intensive Care Unit, Cardiac Diagnostic Center and Comprehensive Breast Care Center.
  • 16 NIH/federal grants with over $30MM in total research funding.
  • Medical admissions by the department totaled 11,720 for the academic year 2006-2007, including 4,791 at outside institutions in our hospitalist program. Total hospital visits of 145,492 were seen by physicians on staff. In a significant sign of the time, the average length of stay is a fraction of what it once was —only 3.2 days.
  • The most significant growth was seen in the world of outpatient medicine. Over the 2006-2007 academic year Department of Medicine physicians treated 31,276 office-based initial examination and consultative patient visits. Combined with returning patient visits, 211,140 office-based visits were performed in Department of Medicine physician practice locations in 2006-2007. Total visits in all places of service were 370,106.

    Cooper’s Health Sciences Campus is in the midst of a major expansion to that includes a new patient care pavilion. The expansion project at Cooper is a direct reflection of the growth Cooper has experienced during the past several years. The pavilion is scheduled to be finished in the fall of 2008, a new parking facility is already finished, and renovation of many surrounding buildings and streets is under way as well. The total for the expansion exceeds $169 million.

    Highlights of the new pavilion include:

    • New 10-story, 312,000-square-foot patient care pavilion
    • 60 private medical/surgical rooms
    • 30 state-of-the-art private critical care beds
    • 12,000-square-foot addition to the Emergency Medicine Department
    • State-of-the-art laboratory services located within the new pavilion
    • 10 state-of-the-art operating room suites

    For further Information, please CLICK HERE.

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Contact Information

Director: Vijay Rajput, M.D., FACP
Associate Program Directors:  Elizabeth Cerceo, M.D., Anna Headly, M.D., MFA and Antoinette Spevetz, M.D.
Contact: Laura Chropka or Emily Hartsough, Medical Education Coordinators
Phone: 856 -757-7842
Fax: 856 - 968- 9587
Email: IMresidency@cooperhealth.edu
Address: Cooper University Hospital, UMDNJ– Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Camden, 401 Haddon Avenue, E&R Building, 3rd Floor, Camden, NJ 08103