Welcome from the Program Director

Welcome to the website of the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Program. This is a very exciting time for Primary Care training and practice nationally and locally in New Haven and at Yale. In addition to the evolving national healthcare landscape with increasing emphasis on coordinated care, accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical home models of care, our local healthcare landscape is also undergoing significant improvements that will positively impact the care of patients in our community and enhance training in primary care for our residents. On September 12, 2012, our sponsoring institution, Yale-New Haven Hospital, completed a merger with the other hospital in New Haven, the Hospital of St. Raphael, and with this merger Yale-New Haven Hospital becomes the fourth largest hospital in the United States. The combined resources of these two campuses are expansive and provide a unique opportunity for our Department and Medical Center to strengthen clinical care and training in many areas with a particular interest in and commitment to primary care.

The overarching mission of our residency program is to train houseofficers to become competent and independent internists who are committed to upholding the highest ethical and professional standards of medicine. We seek to train physicians from diverse backgrounds to become leaders and agents of change in whatever setting and niche of medicine they choose for their career. Housestaff learn to provide compassionate, respectful, and evidence-based patient-centered care in a variety of academic and community settings. Through direct observation and feedback from faculty and peers, trainees learn self-evaluation to improve their own skills. Graduates are well positioned to pursue careers in academic medicine as a clinician-educator or researcher, in clinical practice or in health policy. A central tenet of our residency program is that all physicians trained in internal medicine need to acquire a core set of knowledge and skills that are grounded in a biospychosocial model of care and that are applicable to their future career as either a generalist or subspecialist. A summary of the career paths of recent graduates is provided.

Our Program integrates the educational and clinical resources of the Yale Department of Internal Medicine, Yale-New Haven Hospital, a community teaching hospital (Waterbury Hospital), and a variety of ambulatory care sites. Because of the expansion of the Yale-New Haven Hospital campus as noted above, trainees who match into our program to begin internship in June 2013 (the current Match cycle) will shift the site of inpatient community hospital-based training from Waterbury Hospital to the former Hospital of St. Raphael, now the Chapel Street campus of Yale-New Haven Hospital such that by June 2014 all inpatient rotations will occur at the two Yale-New Haven Hospital campuses, located just 0.5 miles apart,. The Chapel Street campus will focus on general internal medicine and will be the professional home of the primary care residency program’s core faculty.

Our curriculum includes an extensive set of didactic conferences at all training sites that are structured to compliment clinical experiences. As you will read in the ambulatory section of this website, the clinical training sites for our ambulatory block rotations are expansive and include opportunities to work in community-based general internal medicine practices, urban health centers, subspecialty hospital-based and community-based practices and one of three settings for continuity practice training. Through all these experiences, houseofficers gain the opportunity to work with physician role models whose careers span the spectrum of possibilities in medicine. We consider this exposure to a diverse group of mentors and clinical training environments to be instrumental to enable houseofficers to discover the niche in medicine that will provide them with the greatest professional and personal satisfaction.

Several specific educational goals of the Yale Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency Program reflect the unique opportunities and resources of the Program. These include developing leadership skills, promoting patient-centered research, participating in activities to improve the health of our community, participating in research and curriculum development to advance graduate medical education nationally, developing effective teaching skills, developing a Biopsychosocial approach to patients, and learning greater personal awareness through self-reflection, structured educational activities and informal daily interactions with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.

We offer fourteen positions in our categorical primary care internal medicine residency program. We welcome your inquiries and appreciate your interest in our program.