Education Curriculum
Daily Lecture Series
Case Conferences
- Our core faculty-led didactic curriculum occurs weekdays from 12-1 pm. This is protected time, so residents are excused from clinical duty to attend.
- The faculty lecture topics are commonly- encountered diseases or clinical scenarios to deliver high-yield information to our new trainees.
- The entire curriculum repeats on a three-year cycle so every trainee enters the Boards Exam with a well-rounded knowledge base of basics, plus the finer points of the medical specialties. The topics in the second half of the academic year will also cover career planning, financial planning, time management, anti-racism, CV creation, minority-inclusive medicine, and fellowship panels.
- Didactics are curated by the Chief Resident for Research and Education and cover most topics tested on Internal Medicine Boards. Attendings from every Internal Medicine specialty, with the addition of Neurology, Psychology, and Radiology, are invited to discuss high-yield topics with an emphasis on physical diagnosis and patient management.
- Case conferences are in person and are highly interactive. Cases selected are either an unusual presentation of a must-know diagnosis or a classical presentation of a rare disease. Usually, the cases are patients still under our care, giving each case a degree of relevancy. Most of the time, attending physicians are present to oversee and help guide the discussion and provide teaching points for the residents. A review of the disease, with emphasis on diagnosis and management, is presented at the end. Additionally, every Thursday case conference is overseen by our supervisory program director, Dr. Fred Zar, making it a fun exercise to try to stump him.
- Throughout the year, we augment the daily conference with a:
- wellness week to discuss topics to lower burnout,
- an ethics week, and
- an urban global health week.
VA Morning Report and "Flame" Hospitalist Report
- VA Morning Report is a Chief Resident lead, 35 min case-based clinical conference held every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 8am for all house staff rotating at the Jesse Brown VA (JBVA).
- Each session is focused on learning and applying a framework-based approach to an inpatient clinical problem using a variety of interactive learning strategies.
- Both UIC and Northwestern Residents benefit learning from their institution's teaching faculty and expert sub-specialty consultants.
- Our UIC residents on a VA consult elective have the added opportunity to pair directly with one of the UIC VA Chief residents to develop their own VA Morning Report in a structured 2-week mentored process that results in a session they can add to their CV.
- Flame Report is a weekly case conference held on Mondays in the resident lounge, led by our Academic Hospitalists. During each session, a faculty member presents an engaging clinical case that residents then discuss, working together to strengthen diagnostic reasoning and management skills.
Monthly Resident Meeting with Program Directors
- We hold a 90-minute monthly ‘Residents’ Meeting’ led by the Program Director and Chief Residents.
- The program director shares updates with the residents, progress made since the last meeting, reminders, and any new policies. Every chief resident shares updates and announcements.
- Residents who go above and beyond the call of duty receive a "UIC- Undeniably Incredible Care" award during the meeting. Items of change are also discussed, and when implemented, feedback is obtained in this and other settings.
Summer Educational Series
- The Summer Educational Series is geared toward interns and are offered once a week for the first two months of internship. They are required for all first-year trainees, but open to all residents.
- These lectures cover a wide range of high yield topics including “Pain Management, Inpatient Diabetes Management, How to find a Mentor, and How to Get a Research Project Started”.
Grand Rounds
- Grand rounds occur every Tuesday during noon conference throughout the academic year, and all faculty are invited to attend.
- Lectures are usually organized by the Vice Head, Education, working in concert with the Division Chiefs.
- Every Internal Medicine specialty is assigned a month in which to invite guest speakers to discuss rapidly evolving aspects of their specialties. There is an emphasis on discussion of recent advances in medical therapeutics that have a high likelihood of changing the standard practice of medicine over the next few years.
- Grand Rounds includes monthly Morbidity and Mortality, where residents lead a “root cause analysis”.
- The APD of Health Humanities and Resident Wellbeing has incorporated lectures on narrative medicine, mindfulness, the art of medicine, and wellness.
conference
Weekly Didactic Schedule
Multidisciplinary Conference and Journal Club
During the third year of internal medicine residency, all graduating seniors conduct either a Multidisciplinary Conference (MDC) or an Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) presentation during the noon conference hour.
For MDCs, the cases discussed revolve around currently or recently admitted patients who had a complicated hospital course due to their multiple co-morbidities, requiring the input of numerous specialists. Faculty from each of the specialties are in attendance. This conference creates a forum in which residents can hear attending faculty from the internal medicine subspecialties discuss their thought processes related to a complex case and how diagnostic and therapeutic interventions were chosen when it was not immediately obvious what the best choice would be. Our graduating residents find that working on this presentation and guiding the discussion strengthens their clinical decision-making skills.
For EBMs, residents work in pairs and select a topic that has rapidly evolved, or one in which there is excellent evidence guiding management. They read the primary literature and then walk the audience of faculty, residents and students through the studies, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Take home points at the end provide a summary of how we can translate the data into excellent patient care. Evaluating evidence is a key aspect of academic training and our residents find constructing these presentations to be an excellent teaching tool.
Morbidity and Mortality
Every month the residency program conducts a Morbidity and Mortality conference in place of the noon conference. The purpose of these conferences is to dissect a patient’s chart, documentation, decision-making and hospital course in hopes of learning what we could do better next time. A senior resident puts the presentation together and an attending from Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine leads the discussion along with specialty consultants who contributed to the patient’s management.
Board Preparation Tools
Our excellent Boards pass rates are due in a large part to the commitment of our faculty in providing high yield didactics throughout the year. We recognize, however, that studying is an individualized process and what is effective for one resident may not be for another. To that end, we provide a variety of preparation tools and materials. Using the results of the In-training Exam (ITE), the Chief Resident for Research and Education prepares Boards study plans for residents who need long term approaches to preparedness. Generalized study plans are available to residents of every year, broken down into blocks based on degree of clinical responsibility. During the last 2 blocks of the academic year, noon conference is routinely replaced by resident-led MKSAP review sessions in which the smartphone-based Polleverywhere system is used to answer MKSAP questions and review why the selected answer is correct, but perhaps equally importantly, why the other answers are wrong. A faculty member from that subspecialty covered in MKSAP is usually present to lead discussions on best answer choices and test taking skills. All residents attend these sessions, getting the PGY1s in the habit of answering Boards-style questions early on. Additionally, we purchase a video-based Boards preparation course every year which the PGY3s watch weekly in the last few months of residency to prepare for the exam.
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