Category Archives: Family Medicine Stories

Mentoring Female Residents

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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Is It OK if Our Residency Graduates Work for Walmart?

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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Assessing the Current Primary Care Situation, I Choose Hope Over Despair

Carlos Roberto Jaén MD, PhD

Carlos Roberto Jaén MD, PhD

According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, tipping point is “the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.” It’s not when the change is fully apparent, it is when it starts irreversibly. As the Affordable Care Act and 2014 loom in the horizon, some of our academic colleagues in the ROAD specialties are describing the local professional scene as one of “suffering” for their colleagues (“They’re losing their shirts”), probably an exaggeration but nevertheless a change. Many of their graduates, after years of “investment” in their training, will be disappointed.

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