Family medicine
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The widening gap between urban and rural health outcomes is exacerbated by physician shortages that disproportionately affect rural communities. Rural residencies are an effective mechanism to increase physician placement in rural and medically underserved areas yet are limited in number due to funding. Community health center/academic medicine partnerships (CHAMPs) can serve as a collaborative framework for expansion of academic primary care residencies outside of traditional funding models. This report describes 10-year outcomes of a rural training pathway developed as part of a CHAMP collaboration. ⋯ This CHAMP collaboration supported development of a rural pathway that embedded family medicine residents in community health centers and effectively increased placement in rural and MUA/Ps. This report adds to national research on rural workforce development, highlighting the role of academic-community partnerships in expanding rural residency training outside of traditional funding models.
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Toxic stress and trauma are prevalent in the pediatric population. The sequela can be significant, leading to disruptive behaviors in early childhood to chronic medical conditions in adulthood. Two factors that can mitigate negative outcomes of developmental traumatic stress include relational health care and healthy parental relationships. Family physicians are poised to play a significant role in both attenuating factors. Therefore, focused pediatric trauma-informed knowledge and skills training for family medicine residents is important. ⋯ After being instructed in best practices in trauma-informed pediatric interactions, residents demonstrated an increased number of behaviors that cultivate pediatric relational health care. Residents demonstrated knowledge and skills gains that denoted their ability to interact with patients and coach parents in evidence-based ways that can mitigate the impact of childhood trauma exposure.
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Student-run free clinics (SRFCs) are settings in which students in health professions gain clinical experience, often while providing free or reduced-cost health care to the surrounding community. The current literature quantifies the many benefits these clinics provide to their patients and the impact they have on students' future careers; but few previous studies have assessed the financial impact of the education provided at an SRFC. We report on a net educational benefit, an educational benefit to educational cost ratio, and a net educational benefit to educational cost ratio of one SRFC from the perspective of the university. ⋯ This analysis demonstrated a potential financial advantage of operating an SRFC when assessing clinic education expenses in relation to the value of university-generated education. Our research may serve as a starting point to showcase the economic benefit of SRFCs to their parent institutions and encourage further analysis of other benefits SRFCs may provide to institutions of higher education.
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The COVID-19 pandemic began interrupting family medicine residency training in spring 2020. While a decline in scores on the American Board of Family Medicine In-Training Examination (ITE) has been observed, whether this decline has translated into the high-stakes Family Medicine Certification Examination (FMCE) is unclear. The goal of this study was to systematically assess the magnitude of COVID-19 impact on medical knowledge acquisition during residency, as measured by the ITE and FMCE. ⋯ This study found nonsubstantive COVID-19 impact on FMCE scores, but a considerable knowledge acquisition decline during residency, especially during the PGY-2 to PGY-3 period. While COVID-19 impacted learning, our findings indicated that residencies were largely able to remediate knowledge deficits before residents took the FMCE.