Curriculum

The Utah Valley Family Medicine Residency provides residents with an exciting and well-balanced approach to learning. We offer an environment that enhances both clinical skills and personal development. Within our multi-faceted program, you'll discover all the resources you need to succeed.

We emphasize ambulatory care and give our residents the complete scope of training to prepare them for any practice style. Our program combines a suburban working environment at the largest medical center between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, with opportunities for training specific to rural areas.

The cornerstone of our Residency is continuing improvement. Faculty and residents review the curriculum on an ongoing basis, ensuring that it is meeting the residents' educational needs. We believe the residents' feedback is essential in maintaining curricular excellence.

FM = Family Medicine in-patient
FM (O) = Family Medicine out-patient
FM (R) = Family Medicine rural
FM (C) = Family Medicine community
BS = Behavioral Science

Family Medicine Center

PGY-1: Two half-days per week at the Family Medicine Center
PGY-2: Three half-days per week at the Family Medicine Center
PGY-3: Three half-days per week at the Family Medicine Center

Call (on average)

PGY-1: Every fifth night on average. Includes two months with no call.
PGY-2: Every eighth night on average. Includes three months with no call.
PGY-3: Every eighteenth night on average. Includes eight months with no call.

Experience includes:

• Two months of inpatient obstetrics. Utah Valley Regional performs approximately 4,100 deliveries each year; 100 – 125 deliveries per resident are anticipated before graduation.
• ACLS, ALSO, ATLS, AWLS, NRP, PALS, and STABLE training provided.
• Computerized medical records.
• ICU\CCU\NICU experience.
• Extensive inpatient and outpatient procedural experience: colposcopy, treadmill, flexible sigmoidoscopy, circumcisions, etc.
• Rural family medicine rotations in Manti, Utah.
• Emergency Department: work in the busiest emergency center in the state, including major and minor trauma.
• Sports Medicine: Longitudinal rotation working as Brigham Young University team physicians. An additional fellowship in Sports Medicine is available.
• Moonlighting opportunities in emergency rooms, urgent care centers, and our own after-hours clinic for PGY-1s.

Competency-based Education

Traditionally, curricula are developed to be general guidelines, outlining educational goals. We believe the problem with this approach is twofold. First, the curricula tend to be vague, offering no specific guidance in determining priorities. This leads to poorly defined expectations and largely subjective evaluations. Next, these curricula focus on content, or specific facts, rather than competency. We believe that while content is necessary, it is not sufficient.

The Partnership Model of Residency Education

We developed the partnership model of residency education based on the principle that we learn best by doing. A family medicine resident will best learn to practice medicine by actually practicing family medicine. This is not limited to simply writing orders, admitting patients to the hospital, and seeing patients at the Family Medicine Center. Residents must learn to function as a partner. As family practitioners, we function as partners in a health care delivery system and also as business partners. We believe the first day a resident functions as a business partner should not be the day after he or she graduates from a residency program. Beginning the first day of training, our residents are expected to fully participate as a junior partner in our group practice. This means sharing in clinical responsibilities and making business decisions.

Longitudinal Training

A block curriculum, in which three years of training are broken into 39 unrelated rotations, only offers the resident selective experience. This type of training does not help the resident integrate the skills and attitudes necessary to become a competent family physician.

Instead, we have adopted a modified longitudinal approach. Specific educational needs are met using select block rotations during a longitudinal experience in family medicine. The longitudinal experience begins the first week the residents arrive.

Basic knowledge and procedural skills are learned early in the residency by way of stacked, month-long rotation in pediatrics, obstetrics, and gynecology, internal medicine, and surgery. In addition, about 20 percent of the residents' first year is spent seeing patients at the Merrill Gappmayer Family Medicine Center, caring for our hospitalized patients, and delivering the babies of their private patients.

In the second year, residents spend about 40 percent of their time in the Family Medicine Center. By the third year, 60 percent of the resident's time is spent as a family practitioner. At the completion of our program, residents are able to function as highly-trained, empathic physicians in both the medical and business aspects of family medicine.

If you are interested in joining a program dedicated to quality post-graduate medical education, we are interested in you.