IM Family

[Omar Khan]

Happy gloomy sunday!

Just curious which sites you guys had and what you thought of them. 

Thanks!

O

[Jared Huber]

Family: Lancaster. One of the first family medicine residency training programs, and I was impressed by the residents I worked with. There are daily didactics that are actually quite helpful. Minus is you live there Monday-Thursday, but you live right across the street from the clinic so there is no commute once you get there. Site Director is great, a Penn Med grad. Patient population was very different from Philly, mostly puerto ricans and poor white people. Spanish is helpful, but not required at all. You get a day in derm clinic, and a day of sports med. I don't hesitate recommending it.

Just make sure that if you really don't want a site put it as far down as possible.

Medicine: I feel like we have discussed HUP enough, so here is my scoop on Renal/ID. You work with 2 attendings (both good and bad). I was only on the service for 4 days, and my only complaint was that it was too short. ID was cool; a significant portion of patients have HIV. Renal was valuable as well. 

I have heard that people enjoy the CCU. GI is helpful as well. 

From what I can tell the specialty rank doesn't really matter for IM. They put you wherever. 

Good luck.

JH

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[Omar Khan]

Thanks J!

Omar Khan

MD PhD Candidate, MS2

Perelman School of Medicine

University of Pennsylvania

[Zachary Hostetler]

Hey team,

I was out at Kennett Family Practice for my family medicine rotation.  For me, it was an ideal location since it was a short 15 or 20 minute drive from my parent's house.  In terms of patient population, you will mostly see white adult patients (surprising given the area's Hispanic population) and likely only a few children.  The site had four physicians, so you switch from one to the next every morning/afternoon.  Typically, you'll go in and do your own H&P and then give a brief presentation to the attending with any sort of assessment and plan you can come up with.  These presentations are informal and generally pretty short, so nothing to be worried about.  I would say 3/4 of the physicians are also very committed to helping you learn if you are proactive and appropriate with your questions.  The office itself also has a very welcoming staff, and it is an interesting time to work there as they are transitioning into a patient centered medical home style of primary care.  Of course, the commute will probably be super annoying if you plan on staying in Philadelphia during the week.  I would expect that with traffic traveling out there will take over an hour each way.  But, if you're really dying to take care of patients in the Mushroom Capital of the World my parents would love to host you for the month! (Seriously I asked them).

For inpatient, I was on Solid Onc for one week with another week of Solid Onc night float.  Patients are admitted if they have a current or former diagnosis of a solid tumor, and are managed for acute medical care or hospice care.  The patients tend to have a complicated oncologic history that the attendings usually want to hear, so you have to be able to communicate that effectively without getting yourself too bogged down in the details.  My experience was that the rotation was pretty slow, and my team carried 4 or 5 patients most of the time.  Unfortunately, I can't say that this is always the experience, so your mileage may vary.  However, fewer patients meant ample time for teaching, which works out well if you have a resident that likes to teach!  

For Solid Onc night float, we got a couple of admissions on 3 out of 4 nights, which was pretty typical.  Again, this meant lots of extra time with your resident for teaching; if your resident is super nice they may let you crash on the bunk or watch infomercials in the call room too!

Hope that helps,

Zach

Zachary Hostetler

zhost...@gmail.com

610-348-6751

The University of Pennsylvania

Perelman School of Medicine

M.D./Ph.D. Candidate, MS2

The Pennsylvania State University
Schreyer Honors College, Eberly College of Science
B.S., Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

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[Kendra Moore]

Hey guys,

I sent this to Christina earlier, so I'll just copy and paste:

I did family at Spruce Internal Med, which overall I thought was a good experience and could be one to rank highly depending on the type of site you want.

PROS: this is a beautiful facility that serves a surprisingly diverse population of people and it's in a great location right by Pennsy. I worked with two preceptors, one in the AM one in the PM and liked them both a lot. They were generally very willing to teach me, and they were both very easygoing and had no expectations of me. It was very low stress. The office manager there is very on top of things, and they gave me my own office. There's always a computer available when there is down time which seems like a small victory but now that I am at HUP I appreciate that it is a big one!

CONS: this is not a family medicine site- it's internal medicine. So I didn't see any peds, gyn, or procedures. The only thing they do there is medically manage patients. You get really good at diabetes, hypertension, statins, decongestants and NSAIDs, but there's not much else going on. It was also not a high volume site. You are supposed to see at least 80 patients in the month and I only made it to 68 (there were a couple of days where no one showed up due to snow, but still it was kind a of light overall).

I'm pretty sure you guys already did your subspecialty rankings, right? but if not, I did GI and I really liked it. It's pretty specialized, so you can actually get a good sense of the issues and the management in two weeks.

Woot woot!

km

Kendra A. Moore
(916) 718 3779 (mobile)

[Hao-Hua Wu]

Hey man,

I did Wrightstown for family med, I would encourage you NOT to rank this high. I spent pretty much 2 hours a day commuting and got sick of driving by my third week, even with the snow days. That being said, here are some more objective points about the rotation:

Pros:

1. You get to do a lot of procedural stuff (blood draws, shots, nebulizer treatments, etc)

2. Everybody there is super nice and welcoming

3. There are 2 DOs and 1 MD at the practice so you get to see a lot of manipulation therapy which was actually a lot cooler than I anticipated

4. The schedule is flexible and the hours are not that bad 

Cons:

1. The drive

2. Lack of an organized schedule. Also out of the 3 physicians only 1 does a good job of teaching

3. Very faith based so religion may come up a lot although I wasn't asked about it until my last day.

4. Patient population is middle to upper income Caucasian folks (with a few Asians here and there), so not as diverse as a hospital

5. Most of the complaints are some combination of bronchitis, URI, strep throat, or the flu and it can get pretty boring when you're on your third flu patient of the day

As for my medicine rotation, I was at the VA and it was an awesome experience. Hit me up if you end up being placed there. 

Hope that helps. 

Best,

Hao-Hua

Hao-Hua Wu
MD Candidate, MS2
Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

wu...@mail.med.upenn.edu

[Omar Khan]

Thanks guys!!

Be safe out there!

Omar Khan

MD PhD Candidate, MS2

Perelman School of Medicine

University of Pennsylvania