Approximately one hour is allotted for a new patient and 20 to 30 minutes for each follow-up. Faculty are actively involved in supervision and are not seeing patients inde pendently while working with residents. When a primary care practice patient is admitted to the hospital, the patient is put on the primary care resident-attending team. This experience gives residents a truly comprehensive, continuous and longitudinal exposure to a panel of their patients over three years. In addition to this clinical experience, a full curriculum for the continuity of care experience has been developed.
Teaching is done with every patient encounter and a conference is held at each half-day session.
Residents are given reading assignments for self-study from an ambulatory medicine bibliography and are responsible for leading conference discussions. Copies of the curriculum and conference topics are available upon request. Residents are encouraged to devote 10 to 15 minutes of every patient appointment addressing issues of patient compliance, patient education, and psychosocial barriers to care. Referrals are made to the Psychiatry Department when appropriate, with communication back to the primary care practitioner. There is a core conference series each year run by the Department of Psychiatry addressing diagnosis and management of psychiatric disor ders for primary care practitioners.