Curriculum

The future of health care in the United States is based on the Patient-Centered Medical Home model, causing the Family Medicine Physician to be at the center of this newly evolving health care system. This large responsibility makes choosing the right residency program one of the most important choices in a young physician’s career. Family Practitioners of the future must be properly trained to facilitate partnerships with their patients, providing personal acute, chronic, and preventative services that are comprehensive, continuous, evidence-based, accessible, and affordable. As the first contact in the medical care system, Family Physicians must have a broad foundation of medical knowledge in every sub-specialty, be able to quickly access up-to-date, evidence-based material, and know when to refer for a higher level of specialty care. In a simple, non-time consuming manner, the Primary Care Physician must also compassionately teach patients, both the importance of prevention, and the importance of managing their chronic medical conditions.

While the above requirements and skills required of the family physician might seem daunting, Bethesda’s three-year family medicine curriculum is carefully designed to give each resident the tools to accomplish all of the above. Resident training at Bethesda Family Practice is comprehensive. Patients are followed in many settings: inpatient, outpatient, nursing home, hospice, and home health visits. Throughout their three years, residents build their own practice of patients who they follow at the family practice center, where seasoned practitioners help cultivate each resident’s clinical skills in a supportive working environment. Residents are pushed to learn up-to-date, evidenced-based medicine during every clinical and didactic experience. Via the multitude of elective months, residents learn priceless pearls and improve their clinical skills in each sub-specialty area, while also gaining a better understanding of when to refer and what tests are necessary prior to referral. Residents graduate from our program in high demand and ready to take on the challenges of being a Family Practitioner with confidence.

Rotations

Family Practice Center

While most months during residency focus on a specific concentration, residents will still continue to see their own patients at the family medicine center throughout their entire 36 months of residency. Interns see continuity patients one half-day per week, second years two half-days per week, and third years at least three half-days per week, if not more. Also, the amount of time each resident receives with each patient decreases as he or she advances through his or her training. Residents start off slowly, seeing one patient an hour. This allows them time to develop their clinical skills and time to research evidence-based practices with which they may not be familiar. Precepting attendings are always available to teach and answer questions. Throughout the three years, residents’ patient load slowly increases until they are seeing three to four patients per hour and are confidently ready to graduate and keep up with the patient load in an outpatient primary care office.

Home Call

No home call is required during intern year. Second and third year residents have five to six weekends and one holiday per year where they are required to take office calls from home. It is each resident’s responsibility to appropriately answer patient questions, give advice, and decide whether or not the patient should go to the emergency or urgent care, or wait until the office hours to be seen in the office. All calls are documented via our EPIC EMR system, which can easily be accessed from home or anywhere Internet is available.