Medicine

“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” For some people, this makes them think of Ecclesiastes, and for others, the Byrds. Me, I think of residency education. One of the things I love about leading the residency program is the seasonality of it, with regular things that must be prepared for and done correctly at the appropriate time. While we have times of the year that are busy and others that are very busy, there’s always something that we have coming up to get ready for, and something we’ve just completed to reflect on. This time of year, we’ve just completed the Match and found out who will be joining us for our new intern class starting July 1. It is a time for reflection on the past recruitment season, and also a time to work on preparations for the new year.

I am happy to report a very successful residency match again this year. Including all of our combined programs, special tracks, and preliminary interns, we will again welcome 47 interns this summer. We continued to recruit more successfully from among our own MCW students, strengthened our ability to draw from a wide geographic area, and also achieved a goal this year of increasing the number coming from minorities under-represented in medicine. We matched 14 MCW students, and overall matched students from 21 different schools in 13 different states from New York to Washington. Other numbers from this year’s recruitment season: total applications 2,006; candidates interviewed 423; people listed on our final rank lists for the match 379; and faculty who helped us with interviewing 69 (priceless!).

A special aspect to our preparations now for the next academic year involves the new ACGME work hours rules, which will limit interns’ shifts to 16 hours and residents’ to 28. This is resulting in some minor and some major changes to inpatient services, most notably for the MICU, nephrology/transplant, VA oncology, and general medicine wards. We will also be making changes in the way we hand-over patients and provide supervision. The details are beyond the scope of this article but it requires hard work and thoughtful planning to assure continued levels of high quality in both patient care and education. Our good news related to the ACGME is that the reaccreditation site visits completed over the last two weeks in March for the residency program and seven fellowships all went very well. It will be several months before we receive our verdicts from the ACGME, but the site visitor seemed impressed by our programs (after the third day making the statement, “If I’d have known how organized you are and how easy this would be, I would have scheduled them two-a-day”). Congratulations to the program directors and coordinators, and a special thank you to all the faculty, staff, residents and fellows who helped make these successful.

Newsletter Committee