Home Careers & Education Graduate Medical Education Our Programs Internal Medicine Resident Program Curriculum & Didactics
The SHS Internal Medicine Residency Program offers comprehensive training in all aspects of internal medicine within a community setting. Our curriculum prepares residents with the clinical skills needed to succeed as hospitalists, primary care physicians, or specialists after residency. Out attendings are encouraged to promote resident autonomy so that residents feel ownership of their patients and learning in a safe supervised environment.
We utilize the X+Y schedule model. X being the weeks residents are inpatient and the Y being residents on outpatient services. For example, 2 to 3 weeks inpatient followed by 1 to 2 weeks outpatient. This ensures that residents have dedicated patient experiences with a balanced schedule to promote wellness.
Below is a sample of our Internal Medicine curriculum for intern year. We provide residents with diverse and robust training experiences in both inpatient and outpatient settings to train confident community-based internists.
Sample PGY-1 Schedule
The inpatient medicine service provides an immersive experience in patient care with teams consisting generally of two interns and one resident. The goal is to provide high-quality care to complex internal medicine patients under the supervision of experienced attending physicians.
Our residency program includes dedicated hospitalist electives designed for upper-level residents to gain hands-on experience alongside attending physicians. These rotations emphasize progressive autonomy, equipping residents with the skills and confidence needed to transition seamlessly into a hospitalist career.
Typical Inpatient Day
At Samaritan, residents participate in a continuity clinic where they manage their own panel of patients throughout all three years of training, fostering long-term relationships and emphasizing continuity of care. This provides a vital service to our community while helping residents to further hone skills in taking care of patients with multiple chronic medical issues. Attending physicians provide residents with evidence based teaching and real-life pearls throughout.
Elective rotations are offered on or off-site with a variety of physicians and specialties. Common elective choices include geriatrics, cardiology, infectious disease, POCUS, hematology/oncology, endocrine, pulmonology, nephrology, rheumatology, anesthesia and more.
This takes place every Wednesday afternoon. This includes faculty lectures from general internists and subspecialists, journal club, morbidity & mortality conference, board reviews, and skills training are some of the activities done on this day. Mandatory didactics is a time that is valued and protected for all residents.
Our residents design their own evaluation forms based on their goals, values, and priorities. None of our forms include numeric scales. Our faculty and leadership firmly believe that our trainees are more than a number on a scale. This evaluation system ensures that trainees hear about the topics that are most important to them and get tips on areas where they feel they struggle the most. This system allows trainees to take control of their residency experience and get useful guidance from the faculty who are dedicated to their training. This system works! Since implementing this new format, we have seen massive increases in resident well-being, especially in how meaningful, engaging and positively challenging our trainees find their work.
Residents are encouraged to participate in scholarly activities, including clinical research, quality improvement, case reports, and more. Many of our residents present their work at local and national conferences. Many present their work at local and national conferences. Samaritan Health Services provides a medical library and librarian to support your research, and our biostatisticians can assist in analyzing your data for publication.
Residents can take electives in POCUS and work one-on-one with faculty members trained in POCUS. Residents also have the opportunity to access Butterfly POCUS Devices to enhance their clinical physical examinations.
During their PGY-2 year, our residents undergo a nine lecture small group series discussing the experience of pain, the role of medications and procedures, and an evidence-based approach to supporting patients who are suffering with chronic pain. The main objective of this curriculum is to support trainees in caring for their most distressed patients.
We provide our residents with the following resources for board review:
Each PGY-1 receives a laptop with access to journals and texts through our library and access to EPIC, our EMR. Residents receive the latest edition of digital/print MKSAP. They also receive an educational stipend to attend a board review course in their third year.
The program takes resident well-being seriously:
