Nationally Recognized Curriculum

ChristianaCare’s Family Medicine Residency Program has an innovative longitudinal curriculum. Our innovations have led to transformation and changes in the content, structure, and location of residency training. Residents will focus on learning in the ambulatory care setting where family medicine physicians spend the majority of their time. With our longitudinal curriculum, we are able to tailor learning experiences to the needs and interests of each resident.

Details of our curriculum

Orientation

To create the most positive transition to your residency experience, we devote the first month of internship to family medicine orientation.
The purpose of this month is to:

• Immerse interns in ambulatory family medicine.
• Allow residents to become thoroughly comfortable with our office, our staff, our faculty and our residents before going to other services and rotations.
• Provide interns with an early sense of belonging to the Family Medicine Department.

The components of this orientation are:

• Shadowing to learn flow.
• Meeting the nurses, front desk staff, preceptors, residents, etc.
• Ambulatory didactics.
  • Procedural training.
  • Billing and coding.
  • EMR training, pearls, practice.
  • Chronic disease management.
  • Social determinants of health.
  • Evidence-based medicine.
  • Advocacy.
  • Inpatient orientations.
  • “A day in the life of an intern.”
• Interns will have at least seven office-hour sessions in the first month of training.

Thursday afternoon conference

Residents attend resident conference every Thursday afternoon, unless on a rotation that provides its own specialized didactics.

Conference consists of a mix of lectures and small-group case-based learning workshops, simulated learning and field trips. Residents give various presentations, including morning report and morbidity and mortality report.

Osteopathic Recognition

Our Family Medicine Residency at ChristianaCare Health System proudly has Osteopathic Recognition through the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). People are complex units of mind, body, and spirit. This concept of unity is a fundamental value in the way we apply Osteopathic practices and principles to patient care. Our Osteopathic curriculum takes a combined approach of hands-on didactic, clinical, and in hospital educational experiences to further develop your skills and knowledge on the path to practicing medicine independently.

Elective Pathways

• During your three years of residency, you will have the opportunity for 24 weeks of elective time – 4 weeks in PGY-1, 10 weeks in PGY-2, and 10 weeks in PGY-3. We have developed Elective Pathways to help you design an individualized learning plan that best fits your career goals. Elective plans have been developed to provide structure for your elective experiences while allowing for significant flexibility. You will be assigned an elective mentor who will meet with you throughout residency to make sure that your pathway continues to be the best fit for you.
• Current elective pathways include:
  • Outpatient family physician
  • Sports Medicine fellowship
  • Lifestyle Medicine board certification
  • Academics/Teaching
  • Geriatrics/Palliative fellowship
• Other pathways in the works include: Addiction, Global Health with certificate of track completion, High volume OB for FMOB certification, Reproductive Health/termination training (RHEDI grant application pending), Medical Spanish, LGBTQIA+ care including Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy, Hospitalist Medicine.
• If there is a topic that you are interested in that is not on this list, we will work with you to design an elective pathway for it.

Program Year 1 for Family Medicine Residency Program

*= Divided into 2–4-week blocks of time throughout the year, including up to 4 weeks of night float
**= Incorporated into above schedule based on your preferences

Program Years 2-3

The second- and third-year curriculum is longitudinal and incorporates core family medicine training with the innovative elements of our transformative approach. Opposed to the traditional one-month rotation blocks, our program is arranged such that residents are on one-week blocks called mini blocks. These mini blocks repeat through second and third year. This invites flexibility and repetition of learning into our curriculum.

Components include:

• Experience in a broad spectrum of care, including nursing home, geriatric care (ambulatory and home visits), OB clinic, pediatric ER, urgent care, mobile health unit and rural rotations.
• Six to eight weeks of daytime inpatient coverage and three weeks of night float as part of Wilmington Hospital Inpatient Service (WHIP).
• Ten weeks of electives annually.