Curriculum Highlights

Ambulatory Continuity of Care Curriculum

West Suburban Medical Center’s Family Medicine Residency Program offers a choice of four outstanding Family Medicine Centers. Each has an incredible breadth and depth of experience, with expert Family Medicine Faculty to teach over the three years of Residency. Residents will feel very well prepared to enter practice upon their completion of the Program. Graduates, over more than 30 years, have chosen inner city Federally Qualified Health Centers, suburban group or solo practice, rural practice, academic settings, and international options. Many have constructed practices that comprise a combination of these. Unique diversity, instruction, growth, and intensity among our Family Medicine Centers make our Ambulatory Continuity of Care Curriculum a noteworthy highlight.

Family Medicine Service/Critical Care Unit Curriculum

As a structurally unopposed Residency Program, within a community hospital, our Residents take advantage of tremendous opportunities to manage inpatients during these months. Our Family Medicine Faculty routinely manage their inpatients, as well as unattached patients entering care through the Emergency Room. Subspecialty colleagues, who are often brought in as consultants, have a long and strong tradition of working with our Residency Program, and are viewed as superb teachers. From the PGY-1 Intern, learning the many nuances of inpatient care, to the PGY-3 Senior Resident, leading the service, graduates finish having experienced and benefited from the growth in confidence, and competence from such a process. Again, this curricular piece is certainly a highlight.

Perinatal & Child Health Curriculum (OB/Pediatrics)

Consistent with our vision of comprehensive training across all life cycles, our Perinatal & Child Health curriculum provides a unique model for obstetric and pediatric education. Rather than separate these, they are combined, so residents will think of mothers and their babies together. In addition to routine deliveries and newborn care, the resident service regularly includes complications of pregnancy, complications in the neonatal period, and many common pediatric cases. Social workers, community nurses, and outreach workers are included on the team to address individual patient needs. By Residency’s end, each resident will feel confident in managing the wide array of obstetric, newborn, and pediatric clinical problems. The Perinatal & Child Health curriculum is founded in the belief that Family Physicians can make critical impact on the health outcomes of some of our most vulnerable patients. It is certainly a highlight of our Residency Program.

Behavioral Medicine Curriculum

It is our belief that one of the most unique skills family physicians have to offer their patients is their commitment to provide comprehensive and humanistic health care. This concept embraces the notion that patients are people with families and personal histories that transcend the brief office encounter for an acute illness. Our program recognizes the difficult task of teaching Family Medicine residents proficiency in a broad range of biomedical, as well as psychosocial, problems by adopting the biopsychosocial teaching model throughout the three years of the training experience.

Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry lectures are dispersed throughout the three-year curriculum, and cover a wide range of topics related to human growth and development, and the individual/family life cycle. The lectures also provide an opportunity for the residents and faculty to explore diagnostic and intervention strategies which family physicians can utilize to help patients and their families who are experiencing psychosocial and behavioral problems.

Once per month, there is a one-hour psychiatric case conference presented by a noted area psychiatrist.

In an attempt to further educate residents on the complexities of human behavior, the stages of individual and family life cycle, and the relative impact of health and illness on families, the program’s curriculum and faculty devote a significant amount of teaching time specifically to the area of behavioral medicine. This component of the curriculum is designed to provide each resident with a variety of structured learning experiences which assist in the development of cognitive and interpersonal skills necessary to function as an effective family healthcare provider and educator.