Residency | Description of Rotations | Continuity Clinics

Continuity Clinics

Longitudinal care is an important component of a physician's treatment of patients. This skill is acquired during the Residency Program through a continuity clinic. Each resident in the Residency Program has a continuity clinic that meets on average ½ day per week. There are continuity clinics at the VA Medical Center and Yale-New Haven Hospital. Patients assigned to the resident in these clinics become the primary responsibility of that resident. The resident, with supervision by the assigned attending, performs all aspects of neurological care for those patients, including follow-up care and problems that arise between visits, other than acute admission to the hospital. Night coverage for these outpatients is generally shared between residents.

Yale Continuity Clinics

The home of the Department of Neurology's outpatient clinic is at the garden level of the Yale Physician's Building at 800 Howard Avenue. Residents spend half a day there each week seeing patients in follow-up after discharge from the hospital or new referrals. To ensure continuity, a system is in place so that residents who take care of a patient in the hospital also see that patient in their own clinic. Residents book their patients in either a dedicated stroke continuity clinic on Monday afternoons or a general neurology clinic on Tuesday aftenoons. There is also a Neurology Urgent Access Clinic (NUAC) on Thursday afternoons for new patients needing urgent evaluations referred by primary care physicians or the Emergency Room. Patients seen in the NUAC clinic are then followed by the resident in his or her Monday or Tuesday afternoon continuity clinic, The clinic is equipped with an electronic record system, and all clinic notes are entered electronically. Both inpatient and outpatient imaging are available for review through an electronic database.

VA Continuity Clinics

The outpatient center at the VA is a recently renovated, spacious clinic, where residents have continuity clinic three times per week - Tuesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, and Friday afternoon. Tuesday morning clinic is a new consult clinic while follow-ups are seen in Wednesday and Friday afternoon clinics. The resident, with supervision by the assigned attending, performs all aspects of neurological care for those patients, including follow-up care and problems that arise between visits, other than acute admission to the hospital. Night coverage for these outpatients is generally shared between residents.