Education

Who will I be competing with for patients?

The Family Medicine Residency Program is the only graduate medical education program at Forbes Regional Hospital, so there is no competition for patients. Each rotation provides you with the challenge of direct responsibility for patient care under the continual, appropriate supervision of attending physicians. Your second-year pediatrics, medicine, and obstetrics rotations allow you to teach and work with first-year family medicine residents. There are also opportunities in all three years to teach medical students.

Where do I complete rotations?

Outpatient office, hospital medicine, obstetrics, and pediatrics rotations are all completed at Forbes Regional Hospital. Call is never taken at another hospital. The medicine service only takes admissions from two family medicine groups and not from a variety of private doctors. The number of admissions is capped so that residents have time to learn from each patient.

What is the call schedule?

The call schedule is arranged so that residents see all types of patients at all points during the year, instead of limiting the exposure to one area of medicine to the few months they are on that service. The call-to-call variety of coverage is similar to the experience in practice after residency.

Frequency: First-year residents will be on call approximately 5 times per month.  Second-year residents will be on call about 3 or 4 times per month.  In the third year, residents will be on call 2 or 3 times per month.

Exposure: Residents handle admissions to their own services, as well as respond to calls regarding acute problems, such as chest pain, shortness of breath, or abdominal pain.  This is not the case for routine problems or orders on all patients in the hospital.

Night Float:  One resident on the night float rotation takes calls Monday through Thursday nights. After midnight, the resident takes all calls and only awakens the other resident on call, if needed.

Two residents are on call each night, one to cover admissions and obstetrics, and the other to cover acute calls and pediatrics. Each resident works autonomously, without the usual hierarchy of teams, although the other resident is always available for consultation and assistance. Residents call the attending physicians directly to discuss their findings and plan the course of action. There is always a pediatrician in the hospital who provides 24-hour continuity of pediatric education. While on call, residents also answer phone calls from the Family Medicine Center patients.

What else should I know about the Program?

Our Family Medicine Residency Program has many unique features.   In addition, we feature the following to support learning:

• Advanced technology - Family Medicine residents are provided with advanced technological tools for learning. including a Fujitsu Lifebook for patient care and residency activities.  In addition, our organization uses Allscripts, one of the most user-friendly outpatient electronic medical record (EMR) formats available. Both the Lifebook and EMR are accessible to our organization's physicians through the Web-based Physician Portal.
• Team dynamics - Unlike most other residency programs, our program focuses on team dynamics. While attending physicians teach evidence-based medicine, they are also open to discussing different ideas regarding patient management. The atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation adds greatly to the learning experience.
• Supportive Hospital Administration  - Our hospital administration ensures that residents have 24-hour support for clinical care and computer services, which says a great deal about how the hospital views the residents' role here - as doctors.

What about accreditation?

The Family Medicine Residency Program fulfills all requirements of the American Board of Family Medicine and the American Osteopathic Board of Family Physicians.

The program has been fully approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) since 1978 and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) since 2009.