Elmhurst Hospital Center

Pediatric Primary Care Program B

Residency Experiences: Overview

The Pediatric Primary Care Residency Training Program at Elmhurst is dedicated to training residents to be outstanding general pediatricians. It accomplishes this goal through a curriculum that provides extensive didactic and clinical experiences, emphasizing the delivery of care for the children in all states of health and disease. Additionally, a broad exposure to the pediatric subspecialties is present in the context of subspecialty rotations designed to provide a foundation for possible future subspecialty training. The pediatric house staff officers participate in all aspects of service delivery including the inpatient units and nurseries as well as the acute care, specialty, and continuity clinics.

The teaching program is designed to provide a broad base of knowledge, skill, and experience necessary for the practice of general primary care pediatrics. House staff officers participate both as students and as teachers, thus integrating key philosophical concepts through ongoing feedback and evaluation by their preceptor. Through classroom and clinical instruction, emphasis is placed on care of the total child through the collaborative efforts of the health care team. The primary care curriculum is enhanced through instructions in such areas as the psychosocial aspects of patient care, basic biomedical skills and content, legal and ethical issues, changes and challenges for health care in the coming decade, and caring for the at-risk population. Development of the resident's interviewing and history-taking skills is also highly stressed, and these important skills are reinforced through the use of modern teaching technology available at Mount Sinai's Morchand Center for Clinical Competence, where professional child actors assist residents in developing their interviewing techniques. DVDs of these encounters are evaluated and critiqued by departmental staff to provide the resident with meaningful, interactive feedback. Emphasis is also placed on the areas of developmental evaluation, behavior and the acculturation of immigrant children through a full Child Psychiatry and Family Therapy program.

All new residents are assigned to a continuity team beginning in the PL-1 year of training. This assignment continues through the completion of the residency program. The schedule of continuity clinics along with a schedule of rotations for PL-1, PL-2, and PL-3 years is shown below.

A series of conferences also serves to support this primary care philosophy. Among these are daily morning report, Radiology rounds, daily Ambulatory Care Conferences, weekly case presentation conferences, Grand Rounds, Morbidity and Mortality conferences, Journal Club, and pediatric subspecialty conferences.