Team Structure and Call Structure

Residents complete inpatient rotations at UConn John Dempsey Hospital at UConn Health, and at The Hospital of Central Connecticut. At both sites, teams contain a resident-intern pair, a full-time academic hospitalist attending, and a 3rd or 4th year medical student from the University of Connecticut. The hospitalist attending is responsible for the care of all patients on the team, and makes teaching rounds at the bedside with the team each day. Both sites make extensive use of night float systems. Residents take night call only once or twice each month. At The Hospital of Central Connecticut, interns take evening call until 9 p.m. every fourth night and stay overnight for call once each month. At UConn Health/John Dempsey Hospital, interns serve night call every fourth night.

Workload/Work Hours

PGY1 residents (interns) care for a maximum of 10 patients at any given time on the inpatient service. The training system has been carefully designed to adhere to work hours requirements. Interns do not work more than 80 hours each week, or more than 30 hours consecutively. The overall schedule has been designed with significant attention to work-life balance.

Responsibilities

PGY1 residents (interns) have primary responsibility for the care of all patients on their team. This includes writing daily progress notes, developing a management plan with the team, and interacting with patients, families, and consulting physicians. Upper level residents are responsible for supervising interns and medical students on inpatient services. Residents enjoy considerable autonomy in their decision making, but appropriate guidance and support from attending faculty is always available. Residents have easy access to medical and non-medical subspecialty services for consultations.

Patient Population

Our inpatient medical services care for wonderfully diverse patient populations. We care for patients of all ages, races, and socioeconomic groups. Patients are admitted from private office practices, general medicine and specialty clinics, and the hospital emergency departments. We have access to an extraordinary range of internal medicine problems ranging from the common to the highly unusual, and from exacerbations of chronic diseases to acute catastrophic illnesses.

Educational Activities

The core curriculum at both inpatient sites includes a full schedule of daily conferences including intern morning report, resident morning report, teaching attending rounds, grand rounds, professors rounds, journal clubs, patient safety conferences, autopsy conferences, and advanced physical diagnosis rounds. We have an innovative web-based curriculum for both inpatient and outpatient topics, which contains imbedded tests. Many live conferences are tailored to the web-based curriculum for enrichment and consolidation of the knowledge content.

We strongly promote development of the skills required to review and present evidence-based literature and recommendations. Residents present noon conferences, assigned topics on teaching rounds, and at morning report. The curriculum is integrated and coordinated between the teaching sites.