A Day in the Life

Every 2 weeks this conference provides interns with ongoing education in the fundamentals of medicine. Topics include bread and butter internal medicine topics, ultrasound training, physical diagnosis, clinical reasoning, Evidence Based Medicine curriculum, and emotional resilience and intelligence in medicine. These are protected conferences for our interns both on the wards and on outpatient electives.

Interns have 1 week dedicated to Quality Improvement education. During this time, they work closely with Patient Safety and Quality Improvement experts at Tufts Medical Center and receive didactic and interactive lectures on this topic. Additionally, they gain hands-on experience to apply these skills to a real Patient Safety event.

All residents have a variety of learning opportunities through our other conference series including:

Educational cases seen at Tufts are presented in an interactive format focusing on developing clinical reasoning skills every morning by our residents and Chief Residents. A faculty member from the relevant specialty is present for every morning report to enhance resident education.

This remains our most highly rated educational experience. In fact, our morning report was the prototype used to develop the clinical problem-solving cases in the NEJM by Dr. Jerome Kassirer (former Vice Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Tufts and former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine). Dr. Kassirer still attends and precepts morning report on Friday mornings!

Residents present a recent journal article once a block. They are assigned a faculty mentor (content expert) along with a methods expert to gain a deep understanding of the article and its place in the larger literature on that specific topic. Presentations are interactive where residents are asked to critically evaluate the article and focus on the fundamentals of study design and biostatistics.

Held every block, this conference focuses on process improvement and is led by our residents in conjunction with quality improvement experts to disentangle the case and learn the fundamentals of a root cause analysis. They present their findings during this conference which is moderated by the Department of Medicine leadership.  Many of these conferences have become full-fledged QI projects that residents spearhead and have presented at conferences!

This daily interactive conference is designed to teach a variety of general medicine and subspecialty topics to the residents directly from our expert faculty members in a case-based format.  We have also expanded these conferences, after feedback from our residents, to include non-medicine topics related to diversity and equity in medicine, business in medicine, professional development, and general lifestyle discussions.

During your outpatient clinic blocks in our continuity clinics, on several mornings a week, different outpatient topics are covered and discussed by our primary care attendings.  These can include common problems seen in primary care clinic, pharmacy-based lectures with our outpatient pharmacists, resident as teacher sessions where residents learn some adult learning theory to better their teaching skills, and quality-improvement based discussions for their patient panel.

Every Friday at noon we invite a mix of guest lecturers and Tufts Medical Center faculty to present a wide variety of medicine topics in their area of expertise relevant to the recent medical literature and applicable to the internal medicine boards. Some of our favorite topics over the past year have included the presentation of the paper for the new eGFR equation spearheaded by our nephrology department and how we can provide optimal care including gender affirming therapy to our transgender and gender-fluid patients.