Category Archives: Education

Mentoring Female Residents

Posted on May 7, 2013 by | 1 comment
Sarina Schrager, MD, MS

Sarina Schrager,
MD, MS

There are many unique aspects to being a female physician. Being a female faculty member brings with it another layer of complexity to the relationships with female residents. As a mentor and role model for female residents, we have a unique responsibility to help shape their future.  Like it or not, our residents look to faculty as not only teachers of medicine but teachers about life as a physician. And, a female physician at that.

The female residents in my program often seek me out to discuss issues not related to their education in family medicine but related instead to how they want their lives to look after residency or how they can balance residency with their current lives.

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Posted in Education, Family Medicine Stories, Leadership, Women in Family Medicine Collaborative

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Is It OK if Our Residency Graduates Work for Walmart?

Posted on April 26, 2013 by | 1 comment
Joseph Scherger, MD, MPH

Joseph Scherger, MD, MPH

I attended a health care forecast conference recently and learned a sobering new reality. In the near future, Americans will be getting their primary care services in many different locations.

Walmart has announced that it soon will be offering comprehensive primary care in many of its stores. Walgreens, already the largest provider of immunizations outside the government, will expand its Take Care clinics and manage four common chronic diseases: diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and asthma. A longtime colleague and family medicine educator recently went to work for Kroger’s new clinic system, The Little Clinic. Large employers are setting up workplace clinics to provide common health services while keeping their employees on the job.

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Posted in Education, Family Medicine Stories, Public Health

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Faculty Development and the Family Medicine Milestones: What Do They Have to Do With Each Other?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by | 1 comment
Joseph Brocato, PhD

Joseph Brocato, PhD

If you are like me, I am sure that many of you are vacillating between denial and avoidance—and perhaps even outright hostility—when contemplating the new ACGME Family Medicine RRC Milestones and Next Accreditation System (see http://www.acgme-nas.org/family-medicine.html). While indeed they involve a new way of tracking residents’ attainment of fundamental knowledge, skills, and attitudes, it also suggests that we as faculty need to make efforts to examine how much we know about evaluating our residents in this new era of competency-based education. What are some of the faculty skills we need to hone?
While there are the traditional academic roles of teaching, research, and scholarship and embedded skills within each, we now find ourselves needing to become much more proficient in the area of evaluation: how do we do a thorough evaluation of our trainees, and how do we take a potentially large bolus of evaluation data points for each resident/fellow and make a objective decision about residents/fellows reaching the sometimes seemingly elusive marker of being “competent to practice independently”?

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Posted in Education, Faculty Development

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