Category Archives: Family Medicine Stories

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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Breast-feeding and Family Medicine Faculty

WomenInFM

This is the third in a work/life balance series written by members of the STFM Group on Women in Family Medicine.

Colleen Fogarty,MD, MSc

Colleen Fogarty,
MD, MSc

Returning to work after the birth of a baby challenges all mothers, regardless of the age of the child. However, for breast-feeding mothers, there are special considerations.

Compared with 25 years ago, we’ve made substantial progress in returning to breast-feeding as the best method of infant nutrition. The World Health Organization Guidelines of exclusive breast-feeding for 6 months, followed by weaning foods and continued breast-feeding until 2 years, are widely promulgated by us in family medicine.

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