The Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Program at Wake Forest University is committed to training experts in the practice of general internal medicine. The Primary Care Program accomplishes this goal through increased training in outpatient medicine and the teaching of behavioral sciences in a comprehensive curriculum, while maintaining a solid foundation in inpatient and subspecialty medicine. About 60% of the graduates of this program enter the private practice of general internal medicine. Other graduates continue their training in subspecialty fellowships.

Outpatient Medicine Training Sites:

Community-based outpatient training takes place at the Downtown Health Plaza (DHP), an outpatient health care center that is a primary teaching site for the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.  Over 20,000 adult medicine clinic patients are seen yearly in this facility.  As in private practice, residents are members of a multidisciplinary health care team, working with physician assistants, case managers, patient educators, visiting home nurses, and other professionals who support the internist in providing excellent patient care.  A referral network is available through the Wake Forest subspecialty clinics or through community private practices.

There are many opportunities for learning outpatient medicine including: an intern ambulatory elective block, rotations in the acute care clinics, geriatrics rotations, a two month experience in ambulatory skills, and rotations in community-based general internal medicine practices. Woven throughout these rotations are ambulatory experiences in core non-medical specialties such as ENT, ophthalmology, dermatology and orthopedics. Primary Care residents also participate in a one month ambulatory experience in Hematology/Oncology and a month in Cardiology Skills including ECG and stress test interpretation, echocardiography and CHF disease state management. Outpatient conferences include: Ambulatory Skills Conferences, General Internal Medicine Conference, Pre-Clinic Conference, Primary Care Seminar Series, and informal lectures from other primary care and subspecialty care attendings.

Behavioral Medicine and Professionalism:

The program’s curriculum emphasizes interviewing skills, psychosocial aspects of patient care, support groups for residents, work with Hospice to understand the needs of dying patients, medical ethics, leadership/management skills, and the use of community resources to improve health outcomes. Education in these areas helps each resident master the complex interpersonal issues which lie at the heart of excellence in primary care.

Individualized Learning:

In addition to the planned curriculum, first, second and third year residents may identify individual learning goals and pursue special topics (e.g. health services research, studying decision analysis, or examining health policy questions) during their block rotations.

Regular feedback on each resident’s performance is provided to facilitate understanding of clinical strengths and weaknesses. Primary Care residents are also actively involved in evaluating their program. Through this feedback, residents are able to introduce changes into their learning experience.

Inpatient Training:

The majority of inpatient training and subspecialty training is at the 1,298 bed Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, the major teaching hospital for the Wake Forest School of Medicine. A hospitalist elective at the Forsyth Medical Center, a 926 bed urban community teaching hospital in Winston-Salem, is also part of the residency.

Application:

Medical Students are competitively accepted into the three-year program through the National Residency Matching Program (#153717). All training is coordinated by Dr. David Miller and Dr. Peter Lichstein. There is close interaction between Primary Care and Categorical residents during our residency and we encourage most applicants to apply to both tracks.