Family medicine
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Residency programs are expected to meet many requirements in training their residents, including providing adequate numbers of pediatric visits and procedures opportunities. In the residency program studied here, these numbers were inadequate, despite the efforts of faculty members over the years. A self-designated faculty champion (with traits including vision, persuasiveness, proactivity, and tenacity) launched a series of clinical initiatives to combat these problems. ⋯ A faculty champion who is interested, self-motivated, persistent, and focused on leading the project from beginning to end can bring about significant improvements in a residency program, despite the program's track record of difficulty in making such improvements.
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Limited faculty development is a barrier to advancing evidence-based medicine (EBM) education. This study sought to describe program director perception of EBM culture in family medicine residency training and to assess the association among structured faculty roles, EBM curricula, and specific resident outcomes including publications in EBM. ⋯ Program directors reported strong acceptance of EBM among residents and a high prevalence of a formal curriculum. However, many lacked a specific faculty lead, and few reported that residents had strong EBM skills. This study identified gaps in residency training to support future EBM-skilled family physicians as well as concerns about pathways for the development of future EBM faculty.
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Academic family medicine (FM) physicians aim to balance competing needs of providing clinical care with nonclinical duties of program administration, formal education, and scholarly activity. FM residency is unique in its scope of practice, clinical settings, and training priorities, which may differ between university-based and community-based programs. In both types of programs, these competing needs are a source of faculty dissatisfaction and burnout. We performed this study to explore the allocation of nonclinical administrative full-time equivalents (FTE) for FM residency core faculty members. ⋯ DCs and PDs offer a similar ideal picture of core responsibilities, though subtle differences remain. These differences should be considered for the next revision of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education minimum program standards to best meet the needs of all FM programs.
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The delivery of population health education in medical school can be challenging. We developed a patient outreach activity for third-year students to teach them the role of population panel management in primary care. ⋯ An opportunity exists to continue to teach students about how to communicate with patients about their health and how to address and improve social determinants of health. This curricular activity can be a step toward efforts to align population health and clinical practice and a way for medical students to add value by educating patients.
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Student-run free clinics (SRFCs) have been proposed as one educational strategy to increase medical students' interest in primary care careers. We sought to overcome gaps in the literature by investigating the effect of opening an SRFC at different institutions on institution-level match rates into family medicine, the largest source of primary care physicians in the United States. ⋯ Though SRFCs may potentially support other aspects of undergraduate medical training, they should not be used as a singular strategy for addressing shortages in the primary care workforce in the United States. Further educational research should examine multipronged strategies to increase the supply of early-career primary care physicians in the United States.