Curriculum

The University of Rochester/Highland Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program balances the care of the acutely ill with preventive health maintenance for outpatients, including the chronically ill. In the first year, residents concentrate mostly on inpatient services in hospital medicine, pediatrics, critical care, and obstetrics. Hospital medicine teams are comprised solely of family medicine residents while other teams integrate family medicine residents with specialty residents.

Outpatient rotations in the first year include Orthopedics, Surgery, Dermatology, and Adult and Pediatric Emergency Medicine. The Family Medicine Links to the Community rotation (FMLC) helps residents learn about community resources available to help patients. The final rotation of the first year is Community Medicine, when all interns re-join together to assess a need and develop a project to improve our Community. New in 2024, we have expanded our new intern orientation from 1 week to 3 weeks to truly help new residents acclimate to our community and system. We also have created a 2-week Ambulatory Family Medicine rotation that pairs residents with the many different team members of our multi-disciplinary clinic services, conducts small group learning on important outpatient family medicine topics, and provides expanded time in clinic to apply this new learning.

During the second year, residents spend half of the year engaged in our 5-month "P2" curriculum, where they learn the principles and practices of a biopsychosocial model of medicine from our faculty team of physicians, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. Skills such as CBT, motivational interviewing, and problem-solving therapy are honed. Residents also continue to progressively increase their clinic volume. Residents are given a chance to reflect their own clinical practice and to use their reflections to develop their own art of family-centered clinical care. The other half of the year is more heavily hospital-focused, with additional hospital medicine, inpatient pediatric, and emergency medicine experiences, night float, and electives.

In the third year, inpatient experiences shift to a supervisory and teaching role in hospital medicine. Most of the year focuses on outpatient experiences in pediatrics, geriatrics, orthopedics, gynecology and additional electives. New in 2024, we have created a Jeopardy rotation that provides sick call coverage for residents on essential rotations in most situations. This rotation helps protect residents from being pulled from their electives, outpatient rotations, and continuity clinic for inpatient coverage.

Throughout all three years, residents spend a progressively increasing number of sessions each week in their ambulatory office sites, with increasing numbers of patients per session and increasing management of their continuity patient panel needs in-between visits.

Rotation Schedule

For more detailed information about each rotation, please see the navigation links.