Fox Valley Curriculum

Our curriculum trains residents in the full depth and breadth of family medicine, offering the greatest career flexibility after residency. We believe that your training should be academically rigorous - as you only have 3 years to learn everything you need to know to practice independently - yet friendly because 3 years is a long time if you do not feel supported and valued. Our curriculum has been designed to bring out the best in you as a physician while tailoring the residency experience to meet your needs and interests.

On this page:

• Obstetrics
• Medicine
• Geriatrics
• Pediatrics
• Community Medicine/Behavior Science/Practice Management
• Other Rotations & Experiences
• Procedure Experience
• Allopathic and Osteopathic Curriculum
• Progressive Responsibility
• Resident Support

Obstetrics

• You will have two months in each of the first and second year
• Work in a high-volume labor and delivery unit (120-250 deliveries per resident)
• Learn pre-term labor management, labor induction and augmentation, diagnosis and management of third trimester emergencies and complications, and cesarean section assistance
• Electives available in fertility, high-risk, and operative obstetrics
• Night float system in place
• NICU on site
• Group Prenatal Visits using the Centering Pregnancy model of care

Medicine

• You will spend 4 months in the first year and 2 months in supervisory role in the second year on the medicine service
• Work as a team with hospitalists and community faculty for a broad and diverse experience
• Work in the Collaborative Care model which is a multidisciplinary team based rounding system with a nurse, pharmacist, care manager and physician
• You will also have a continuity experience with your own patients and Family Medicine Center patients
• Third year residents manage their own Family Medicine Center patients and those patients whose PCP is unavailable with one on one supervision of program faculty, providing a longitudinal inpatient medicine experience. This will also help you transition from in house hospital care to caring for hospitalized patients like full scope Family Physicians in the community by daily rounding and phone management when appropriate. This is a difficult transition and one we feel is best accomplished while in a safe supervised setting.

Geriatrics

• You will experience a well-developed, integrated office and hospital curriculum with enthusiastic role model faculty
• Your clinic population will include a good mix of healthy elderly and those with chronic disease
• Our Long-term care geriatrics rotation is in a state-of-the-art nursing home, teaching skills in geriatric and internal medicine, palliative care, and rehabilitative care
• During the longitudinal component, you will care for a minimum of 2 patients at any given time in a nursing home setting throughout your second and third years

Pediatrics

• You will focus on state-of-the-art outpatient care: prevention, management of chronic illness, and skillful response to acute illness to minimize hospitalization
• The inpatient service includes care of hospitalized infants and children, combined with work in the busy on-call pediatrician's office addressing urgent and pre-hospitalization care
• The care of infants and newborns experience includes working in the newborn nursery as well as the on-site NICU at St. Elizabeth Hospital. You will have opportunities to participate in neonatal resuscitations with a team of NICU nurses and attendings. This will prepare you for these events should they occur after residency in any setting.
• Participate in a high-volume circumcision experience
• Work with outstanding, collegial pediatrician role models and UW consultants and outreach specialty clinics
• Choose your own additional pediatric selective month to tailor the experience to your needs and interests
• Elective experience is available at the new Fox Valley Children's Hospital.

Community Medicine / Behavior Science / Practice Management

These three curricula are interwoven into a rotational and longitudinal curriculum, which enhances and integrates learning.

• School system involvement includes teaching sex-education classes and running smoking-cessation courses
• Opportunities to counsel patients and use critical community resources, such as AIDS resource centers, sexual assault crisis centers, domestic violence emergency centers, and rehabilitation programs
• Behavioral medicine experiences include counseling techniques, substance and alcohol abuse resources
• As a second year resident you will work closely with program faculty to develop, implement and evaluate a clinical Quality Improvement curriculum and project
• As a third year resident you will have the opportunity to design your own practice. You will design a practice with a different model of care, work with nurses, medical assistants, reception and faculty to implement it in our Family Medicine Center. The residents work in this practice model for 1 week and then debrief the positives and negatives with those involved.
• You will spend time with physician leaders at the community, medical practice, hospital and health system levels to see what opportunities are available to physicians and how you might work toward those positions.
• As a third year resident, you will spend several clinic sessions supervising junior residents in the clinic with direct oversight and feedback from program faculty. This will help prepare you for teaching students and residents as well as collaborating with physician assistants and nurse practitioners.

Other Rotations and Experiences

• You will learn diagnosis, management and referral patterns for common conditions on rotations with dedicated community attendings from Surgery, Gynecology, Musculoskeletal Medicine, Cardiology, Dermatology, ENT, Urology and Ophthalmology.
• Expand your knowledge and comfort in caring for hospitalized patients with a one month immersive experience in Critical Care Medicine, with ample direct patient care, transfer evaluations and admissions and opportunities for procedures.
• Gain a foundation in managing unstable and undifferentiated patients in our 2 months of Emergency Medicine training. Recognizing those patients that require admission and advanced medical care is an essential skill all Primary Care Physicians need. These rotations are rich in clinical experience and opportunities for autonomy and independent decision making while still being supervised.
• Bookend your residency experience with clinical Family Medicine. As a first year resident, you spend a month on our Family Medicine Center rotation seeing patients in your own continuity practice, gaining confidence in your abilities, becoming more comfortable as a Family Physician and learning about critical community resources and how to mobilize these resources for your patients.

As a third year resident, you will spend a month with a community Family Physician of your choosing. You will continue to see your own patients in our Family Medicine Center, but the majority of your time will be spent in a private practice office, seeing patients, evaluating their model of care, getting ideas for your own practice, refining your approach to patients and working on clinical efficiency.

Procedure Experience

• Weekly outpatient procedure clinic focusing on common outpatient procedures
• Procedural experience within your own continuity clinics
• Procedures include:
  • Female patients: colposcopy, IUD placement, endometrial biopsies, endocervical curettage
  • Skin: biopsies (punch, excisional, shave), cryotherapy, lipoma and sebaceous cyst removal
  • Musculoskeletal: Casting, splinting, joint aspiration and injection and Osteopathic Manipulation Therapy
  • Male patients: circumcision and vasectomy
• Quarterly hands on procedure workshops throughout the year
• Opportunity for 1 or 2 residents per year to learn colonoscopies with sufficient volume to be credentialed by hospital systems.
• High graduate satisfaction with skills in variety of inpatient and outpatient procedures
• Some of the highest volume of procedures of any Family Medicine residency in the state of Wisconsin.

Allopathic and Osteopathic Curriculum

• Continuity experience in allopathic and osteopathic medicine with dual accreditation program
• Osteopathic manipulation treatment room and regularly scheduled clinics
• Statewide osteopathic conferences focusing on OMT techniques and skills

Progressive Responsibility

• As a resident in our program you will move from a very well supervised setting in the early part of your first year of residency to progressively greater autonomy and higher levels of responsibility. The first 2 years of our residency have traditional in-house call where you will grow in your knowledge and decision making abilities while being able to lay eyes on sick patients and receive help on site from community attendings, hospitalists and program faculty. Your third year of residency has been intentionally designed to mimic a group practice with your colleagues. You will help us care for our Residency patients by taking call from home that very closely resembles actual full-scope call. You will field phone calls from patients calling our clinic answering service for advice, evaluate and admit medicine and obstetric patients after hours and manage hospitalized patients from locations outside of the hospital with back-up from our faculty.
  This is big transition that most traditional residencies force their graduates to learn after graduation. We feel that this is more ideally learned while you are a resident with supervision and help available. This will also emphasize that full scope practice provides immense satisfaction, can be done and is very manageable.

Resident Support

Adequate preparation for the practice of family medicine requires periods of rigorous work in the hospital and clinic. Staying emotionally healthy, however, requires a balance between work and play, and a support system to help maintain a positive outlook.

A balanced and fair call schedule is essential to resident well-being, as are the following services and functions:

• Program orientation: Includes ACLS and ALSO training, introduction to the clinic and program, and social events, such as a day-long class canoe trip and a clinic-wide annual picnic. NRP is also later in the the first year.
• Annual weekend retreat: An off-site weekend, planned by residents, to encourage relaxation, recreation, and personal growth for residents and their families/significant others. Faculty physicians assume call responsibilities and release residents from other duties.
• Balint group: Monthly gathering of resident and faculty physicians, facilitated by program psychologist, featuring discussions of challenging medical and life situations.
• Monthly resident forum: Opportunity for residents to discuss issues without faculty, thereby encouraging private open dialogue and problem-solving.
• Monthly resident-faculty "rap": Opportunity for residents and faculty to candidly discuss concerns and engage in mutual problem-solving and support.
• Annual social event with volunteer community faculty.
• Tuesday afternoon conferences. Lectures and seminars covering the gamut of medical, behavioral, practice management, procedural, and other curriculum categories.
• Advisor-advisee and class meetings.