Didactics and Conferences

The Internal Medicine Residency Program offers a robust conference series covering acute care, primary care, board review, and evidence-based medicine, taught by our chief residents and some of the best faculty at UVA.

Our Morning Report is an interactive experience occurring four days per week and is consistently valued as the top educational conference by our residents. We review interesting cases that have come into our general medicine or subspecialty services involved in this teaching hour. Lunch is provided at these conferences four times per week.

We also have a weekly Intern Report on Wednesday afternoons, an educational hour that is protected for interns while their pagers are covered by upper level residents. This conference focuses on intern-specific learning objectives.

Medicine Grand Rounds occurs every Friday and is focused on a variety of multidisciplinary topics designed to engage both the general practitioner and the subspecialist.

Other teaching conferences that occur on a regular basis include:

• Evidence-Based Medicine and Journal Club – teaching sessions led by upper level residents, reviewing and critiquing major articles
• Morbidity & Mortality – conference led by residents to review cases that highlight common pitfalls in clinical decision-making
• EKG morning report – high yield review of normal EKGs and cardiac pathologies
• Chest Imaging morning report – high yield review of chest x-rays and chest CTs with associated pathologies
• Medical-themed interactive games – Jeopardy, Family Feud, Taboo, Price is Right
• Gross & Micro Pathology conference – multidisciplinary combined conference with our pathology conference, reviewing a recent autopsy case of a patient care for on our general medicine or subspecialty services

All residents undergo a comprehensive review of the “basics” of critical care medicine prior to their ICU rotations. This includes a multidisciplinary ACLS review and a procedures workshop led by our pulmonary fellows in UVA’s state of the art Simulation Center. All new upper level residents undergo a Teaching Teachers to Teach curriculum dedicated towards helping our residents to develop as teachers.

The “+1” week, which allows our residents to focus their energy on outpatient medicine, is complemented by a dedicated ambulatory education series on Wednesday mornings. The first session is comprised of a rotating series of lectures that cover topics such as safe sign-out and handoff-of-care practices, motivational interviewing, office procedures, humanism in medicine, health policy, career guidance and contract overview. The second session is spent on a case-based curriculum that covers assessment and management of common ambulatory conditions. The third session is dedicated to longitudinal quality improvement projects in which residents learn and apply various principles of quality improvement to actual issues identified within the UVA Health System. We also host an outpatient journal club once per quarter to cover new discoveries in ambulatory medicine and principles of critical appraisal of literature.