Curriculum
The Clinic Is the Curriculum
We believe that the best way to learn to practice as a family physician is to BE a family physician. The learning comes from exposure, experience, practice, and continuity with your patients over time. We assign a full panel of patients to each resident when they start, and they carry that panel throughout their three years. Each resident’s schedule is designed to ensure that they have enough consistent time in clinic to build meaningful relationships with their patients and to provide them with compassionate, excellent care.
Train How You Will Practice
Our longitudinal curriculum was one of the first of its kind, and it remains one of the most unique. We created it with the concept of interleaving at its core – the idea that learning is best achieved when the learner alternates topics of study. We took apart our traditional block curriculum that focused on one discipline only, per month, and broke each rotation into smaller pieces, mixed and distributed over time, so that the areas of study alternate throughout each year, and over the three years of residency. We believe that in addition to improving the educational experience, this models how the true family physician practices, holding all the knowledge of how to care for multiple patient populations and acuity settings at the same time.
Medicine Should Be Sustainable
Our mission is to produce skilled family doctors with professional habits and that help them lead long, fulfilling careers. We recognize that practicing family doctors have families, communities, and interests outside of medicine, and that part of residency training is learning to balance the demands of our profession with the other pieces of our lives.
Our residents help us to plan sessions and activities focused on peer support and skills for good health in life and practice. Some of the ways that we have worked to integrate wellness into the educational process are:
- Welcome Picnic at the beginning of the year
- Assigned senior resident “buddies” and “families”
- Residents and Faculty attend an overnight retreat every October
- Residents and Faculty attend a half-day retreat every Spring
- Wellness topics and time are included in didactic sessions
- Balint Groups facilitated by Behavioral Science Faculty
- Residency class support groups with time provided during didactics
- Scheduled residency social events, such as potluck dinners, concerts, movies, community service events, and local hikes
- Each residency class is scheduled for one weekend retreat each year
Growth Mindset is Essential
- Education is primary. We strive to help each of our learners with their individual learning goals. We will work with you to create an individual learning plan to help guide your experience during residency, to identify your learning needs and how we can best help you to meet them. Each of our learners comes to us with different past experiences and different future goals, and we see our role as helping to bridge the two. Each resident is provided with elective time throughout all three years, including a full month away in each of the R2 and R3 years, for individualized learning.
- Care for Diverse Populations. Resident panels at our two sites embedded in the KPWA Capitol Hill and Burien clinics will have patients of all ages, including prenatal care, pediatrics, adolescents, and adults of all ages including nursing home and hospice care. We provide opportunities for gender affirming care, HIV care, and Suboxone management. Our patients speak a range of languages and are provided with translation services at their visits.
- Full spectrum training. Our curriculum is broad-based, designed to give graduates experience in every aspect of medicine and practical competency in general hospital care and low risk obstetrics. Our graduates are prepared to enter into a wide variety of settings after graduation, whether it is rural or urban, domestic or international.
- Community service. Our longitudinal curriculum allows residents to continually provide community service and learn community medicine. R1s will work at Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center, an FQHC and the only Black Panther-founded community health clinic still operating today. R2s provide care to youth experiencing homelessness at the YouthCare Orion Center. New this year, R3s will work in the King County Jail providing care with one of our residency alumni.
- Abortion training. All residents participate in a rotation at Planned Parenthood and staff a residency-led clinic to train in counseling, early dating ultrasounds, and medical and surgical abortions. Additional training is available at Kaiser Permanente and at other sites for those interested in more experience. Residents may opt out of the provision of abortion but will be expected to learn basic miscarriage management and provide balanced counseling to patients.
- Didactics & conferences. Residents attend weekly didactic teaching on Wednesday afternoons, with all-day sessions occurring once per quarter. This time is used for more traditional classroom-based learning, with core teaching provided by faculty along with specialists and guest speakers. Anti-racism training is built into this time, as are wellness activities like Balint and class groups.
Residents Contribute to Curriculum
- Health systems improvement: All residents are involved in the creation and updating of Kaiser Permanente clinical guidelines and quality improvement projects in the clinic as part of their scholarly work.
- Curriculum development: We offer many opportunities to participate in changing and improving the curriculum. We invite resident involvement in the development and organization of all the elements of our curriculum, and we have residents work with each of our faculty on the core curricular areas and on any focus committees that form. We have one third-year resident lead who works closely with our APD for Curriculum.
- Areas of concentration: We welcome residents with a particular area of passion to pursue additional training and earn an “Area of Concentration.” This is not required but can be built into elective time if desired. Recent graduates and current residents have established areas of concentration in HIV care, geriatrics, sports medicine, research, systems management, reproductive health, and evidence-based medicine.
- Research Research opportunities are available by using elective time to partner with KPWA’s research institute, which constantly has a variety of studies in progress.