Residents provide ongoing continuity care for their own panel of patients under the supervision of full time, experienced, general medicine Faculty preceptors, who are members of the General Medicine Section at Yale and who receive ongoing faculty development in ambulatory teaching skills. During the residents' clinic session, the faculty devotes their time exclusively to precepting and maintains a 3 to 1 resident to faculty ratio. An innovative faculty-resident schedule synchronization system ensures that residents work with the same primary preceptor each week, even if their clinic day is switched to accommodate inpatient rotation conflicts. The patient visits include new patients, return visits and urgent care and include a broad range of primary care problems. Several policies and logistical arrangements ensure that residents participate in their patients' care during unscheduled clinic time, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions.
Residents also participate in periodic quality assurance activities.
In addition to ongoing informal feedback, residents receive yearly formal evaluations from their preceptors and have the opportunity to evaluate their preceptors teaching skills and the operations of the clinics. It is one of two continuity clinic-training sites for house officers in the Yale Primary Care Program. Each resident participates in this longitudinal training experience, on average, one-half day per week and follows a panel of patients throughout the entire period of residency. On the whole, the population is relatively young with most patients being between the ages of 18-45. While the spectrum of disease mirrors that of most primary care practices, the acuity of illness may be somewhat greater than that seen in the community.