Traditional Internal Medicine Residency Training Program
Welcome from the Program Director
Cyrus Kapadia, M.D.
|
During the past several years, we have witnessed unprecedented change both in the structure and content of medical care. In structure, we have experienced a redefinition of the role of the hospital in the management of a patient's illness. Now, only patients who are severely ill are hospitalized; most others are diagnosed and treated in ambulatory settings. In content, we have come to recognize that the successful care of patients requires knowledge not only of molecular medicine and pathophysiology, but also of the sciences that guide clinical decision-making, such as clinical epidemiology and behavioral medicine. Cutting across all of these concerns is the societal conviction that medical care is too expensive, and that physicians must become more sensitive to the balance between cost and quality.
The Department of Internal Medicine at Yale has a long history of excellence in patient care, education and research. Our Residency Programs reflect these strengths. Students have the opportunity to select from three residency programs that offer a variety of clinical and didactic experiences. Our goal is to attract the brightest and most dedicated students to our Department.
We have designed programs that will enable us to set a standard of excellence for educating the future investigators and practitioners of internal medicine. To insure that our residents learn to manage patients with common ailments in a setting where critical decision-making occurs, we have incorporated increasing blocks of ambulatory time into the residency schedule. Since scholarship is such a critical element of our departmental identity, our residents are encouraged to pursue research opportunities during residency. A formal research elective is integrated into the residency program. To enable our residents to become independent physicians, we have protected the principle of graded responsibility for both inpatient and outpatient rotations. And to make certain that our residents are fully prepared for the contemporary practice of medicine, we have built into the programs an emphasis on quantitative clinical strategies, cost-benefits analyses, and the social and behavioral determinants of health and illness. Because of the importance of a global perspective in healthcare, we have developed an international Health Elective Program that has created meaningful electives overseas for over half our medical housestaff.
We are able to maintain premier programs of internal medicine training because a commitment to education and scholarship has always been a central value of the Yale University School of Medicine and our educational partners at our major teaching sites, Waterbury Hospital, and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System and Yale-New Haven Hospital. This creative partnership has helped us to assemble an outstanding cadre of faculty who are recognized leaders both in general internal medicine as well as the more traditional medicine subspecialities.
Our overarching goal is to create an educational and clinical environment that provides residents with superior training in Internal Medicine. We have designed programs in which the values of academic scholarship and critical thinking are integrated with a concern for personal development and emotional maturity. After completing one of our residency training programs, the young physician can reflect on the decision to come to Yale for Internal Medicine training in our program with a deep sense of achievement and satisfaction, knowing that he or she has both improved as a physician, and been enriched as a person.