UW Family Medicine

Danielle Rieck, a 2011 graduate of UW–La Crosse, is a volunteer EMT in Ellsworth, Wisconsin, a small rural town near River Falls. Amanda Rynearson is a brain cancer researcher in Rochester, Minnesota. Jeffrey Wood is a firefighter and paramedic in Parker, Colorado, with a wife and three children.

What do they have in common? They’re all first-year students in the UW-Madison Physician Assistant (PA) Program. Read more... »

The Department of Family Medicine (DFM) held its annual Renner/Hansen Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 2, 2011, at the Pyle Center in Madison. Read more... »

In October, the Department of Family Medicine (DFM) hosted five faculty physicians from Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University (AAU) Faculty of Medicine, who were here for a family medicine faculty development fellowship.

Now, just a few months later, these fellows—some of whom had never before explored family medicine in depth—are using their new knowledge to create the very first family medicine department in Ethiopia’s history. Read more... »

Jeremy Amble was always a photography buff. He learned photography techniques as a boy in 4-H, and later put those skills to use working on his high school yearbook.

But when Jeremy suffered a C4 spinal cord injury—one that left him with very limited arm movement and no finger dexterity—he thought he’d never be able to take photographs again. Read more... »

Over the past three years, the Great Lakes FASD Regional Training Center (GLFRTC), a seven-state project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and based at the Department of Family Medicine (DFM), has trained over 5000 healthcare providers to better assess and treat fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD).

In September 2011, GLFRTC received renewal funding to continue those efforts—and also find ways to incorporate screening and brief intervention services into primary care. Read more... »

The Wisconsin Initiative to Promote Healthy Lifestyles (WIPHL) is recruiting healthcare clinics for a new program to further refine the behavioral screening and intervention (BSI) model it’s implemented throughout Wisconsin over the past five years.                                                    Read more... »

As part of its new grant initiative, the Wisconsin Rural Physicians Residency Assistance Program (WRPRAP), a state-funded program administered by the Department of Family Medicine (DFM), recently received two letters of intent to establish new or expanded rural training tracks (RTTs) or rural residency programs in Wisconsin.

It’s an important step toward increasing rural training opportunities for residents—and ultimately, addressing Wisconsin’s critical need for rural physicians. Read more... »

Over one-third of adults in the US struggle with health literacy: the ability to understand, process, and communicate health-related information.

It’s a big problem in primary care—one that not only affects healthcare quality, but also drives up costs. In Wisconsin alone, clinicians lose $3.4 billion each year due to patients’ lack of health literacy. Read more... »

Two projects aimed at improving clinic efficiency—specifically, reducing wait times for nursing visits at the UW Portage Clinic, and reducing total patient appointment times at the UW Health Eau Claire Family Medicine Clinic—won the 11th annual James E. Davis Quality Improvement Awards.

The awards were presented on November 5, 2011, during the Renner/Hansen ceremony and reception. Read more... »

Four years ago, the Department of Family Medicine’s (DFM) Integrative Medicine (IM) Program launched Web-based training materials to help educate its faculty, fellows, residents, and patients on healing-oriented approaches to health.

Now, these teaching tools are used all over the country—and as far away as Spain and Scotland—to train primary care physicians and clinicians in other specialties, support corporate health initiatives, and help patients integrate complementary and alternative therapies into their lives. Read more... »

After a year of construction and anticipation, the new UW Health Belleville Family Medicine Clinic opened its doors to patients on October 3, 2011.

The 20,000-square-foot Prairie-style facility replaces the existing Belleville Family Medical Clinic, which has been located in downtown Belleville for 30 years. Read more... »

Runny nose. Stuffy head. Sore throat. Cough. Fever.

As winter approaches, flu-like symptoms such as these become a more common complaint in people’s lives—and in primary care clinics—everywhere. Read more... »