Personal and Professional Development Program
Residents must learn to balance the demands of their professional careers and their personal lives. Under the guidance of trained faculty, interns participate in a series of retreats designed to facilitate discussion on the stresses of internship and their own wellbeing by promoting resiliency and compassion. Other highly valued retreat topics include dealing with microaggressions, understanding quality improvement and patient safety, and transitioning to resident. Similar morning retreats continue through the PGY2 and PGY3 years and deal with other aspects of medical education including medical errors, professionalism, residents as teacher's, end-of-life care, and financial planning.
Subspecialty Fellowship Opportunities
The medicine subspecialties at UConn offer a full range of fellowship opportunities. Positions are available in Cardiology (including Interventional Cardiology, Electrophysiology and Heart Failure), Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Geriatrics, Hematology/Oncology, Infectious Diseases, Nephrology, Palliative Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Rheumatology and Sleep Medicine. Each fellowship combines intensive clinical experiences with clinical and/or basic science research opportunities. The fellowships are integrated to involve our affiliate hospitals, thereby insuring a broad spectrum of clinical experiences. To gain additional subspecialty experiences, our program offers the unique opportunity to participate in longitudinal clinics in subspecialty. These ‘second continuity clinics’ allow our PGY2 and PGY3 residents to spend a half-day each week during their ambulatory blocks working alongside a subspecialist in their office practice, gaining valuable clinical experience and building strong relationships with our subspecialty faculty.
Mentoring Program
Each of our interns is assigned a faculty advisor who schedules periodic meetings with them throughout the course of the internship year. The first meeting typically involves discussions about how the transition from medical student to intern has gone. The faculty advisor uses this opportunity to provide insight and support to the intern to help make this a smooth transition. Throughout the rest of the academic year, these meetings focus on the personal and professional development of the interns and their achievement of professional as well as personal milestones. The faculty advisor will also help the intern choose an appropriate subspecialty mentor. During the second and third years, the faculty advisor along with the subspecialty mentor will help the resident to achieve their specific subspecialty goals.
Evaluation and Feedback
The Residency Program uses a multi-source evaluation system that includes videotape sessions with clinical instructors, clinical evaluation exercises that are performed in the presence of faculty, peer review, and monthly performance evaluations. Also critical to residents' professional growth is their Biannual Evaluation. This evaluation includes a review of the resident’s progress on each rotation, the identification of strengths and weaknesses, the development of plans to improve performance, and a review and update of procedural competency. Each resident's career goals are discussed and strategies to realize these goals are identified. Our evaluations system is fully electronic. All of our residency programs utilize www.myevaluations.com software to enhance our ability to evaluate residents and our residents ability to evaluate the various programs, faculty, and affiliated hospitals. Our online evaluation system ensures effective, real-time evaluations that encourage self-improvement and program enhancement.
Board Pass Rate/Board Review
The program offers several forms of continuous board review to ensure that our graduates are well-prepared for the exams. As part of our curriculum, each resident is enrolled in ACP Medicine’s Medical Knowledge Self-Assessment Program (MKSAP). Additionally, our program has created a board review course for all senior residents, eliminating the need to purchase a separate board review program.
Educational Resources
UConn Health provides multiple educational resources that enhance the educational experiences of our residents. Our clinical sites have state-of-the-art simulation centers that offer our residents experience in dealing with critical care scenarios in a simulated environment. The University’s library provides free online access to most of the major databases and thousands of on-line journals and textbooks. Residents may access these databases from home, through use of a proxy server. The program also provides a generous book allowance during training which can be used to purchase educational items. Additionally, the program offers a stipend of up to $2,000 to be used by residents for travel to an educational meeting once in either the second or third year of the program. Finally, if our residents have their abstracts selected for presentation at local, regional, national, or international meetings the program offers financial support for printing of posters and additional support for travel arrangements.
Medical Student Education
Our Residency Programs value the role that residents have in shaping the choices of medical students and therefore emphasize one-on-one teaching in the ambulatory and inpatient rotations. There is a very strong link between the UConn School of Medicine and the Medicine Residency Programs. Medical students are specifically integrated into the residents training experience in all required rotations.
Education Committee
Because we are a multi-hospital program, it has been a long-standing tradition that the Program Director, Associate Program Directors, Site Directors, Ambulatory Directors, and Chief Medical Residents meet weekly to discuss our educational program, curriculum, evaluations, promotions, recruitment, hospital sites, and resident performance in an effort to continuously improve our educational product. Our program emphasizes evaluation, improvement, and striving to be the best as we achieve our ultimate goal of preparing residents to pursue their professional goals upon a strong foundation of General Internal Medicine. The educational bond that exists between our hospital facilities is our strength and the reason we succeed. We train our residents by providing an environment of support, collegiality, strong faculty-resident relationships, and educational enrichment.