A skills-based core curriculum and reading selections are incorporated into each specialty rotation. Primary care house staff are also expected to follow their patients if they are admitted to the hospital. Residents also spend one month during the second year at the VAMC's Emergent Care Center, a walk-in clinic that serves patients with acute and nonacute medical problems. Residents can begin to develop expertise in geriatrics during their second year by spending one ambulatory month at UPMC's Benedum Geriatric Center, a program that provides comprehensive longitudinal care to elderly patients. The rotation includes experience providing home visits and exposure to issues in geropsychiatry.
Residents also participate in a series of conferences on common concerns in geriatric medicine.
Finally, second-year residents also participate in Primary Care Grand Rounds. These weekly conferences ensure that primary care residents are exposed, in a small interactive group setting, to important topics in primary care that are often neglected in traditional internal medicine residencies. Subjects like preventive medicine, caring for the underserved, legal issues in signing a contract, health care economics, and medical malpractice have been covered in recent years. In addition to a required seminar series on health care policy and socioeconomic determinants of health, a seminar series on critical assessment of the medical literature is included in the third year. Based on residents' recommendations, a series on common clinical problems in primary care began recently.