Department of Medicine - Knoxville

Medicine Residency Program

Curriculum - Summary

(Please note that some areas are not complete, January 2006)

Schedule (overview)

Venues

Curricular areas

In order to incorporate newer educational methods, keep pace with advances in the field of medicine, fully utilize the talents of our faculty, and meet the new requirements of the ACGME, the Internal Medicine Residency Program has undergone a major revision of its curriculum. This is designed to be a continuing PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle. This has involved the significant effort of Dr. Kim Morris who is a Key faculty member, Dr. Russ French who is head of the UT Institute for Assessment and Evaluation, a working committee composed of faculty and residents, and all the division chiefs at UTMCK.

The residency program is required by the ACGME to train residents to obtain competency in the following six areas to the level of a new practitioner. To accomplish this goal, the program must define the specific knowledge, skills and attitudes as well as the educational experiences needed for residents to acquire. These areas should be considered the six competencies of internal medicine training:

1. Patient care that is compassionate, appropriate, and effective for the treatment of health problems and the promotion of health.
2. Medical knowledge about established and evolving biomedical, clinical and cognate sciences and the application of this knowledge to patient care.
3. Practice-based learning and improvement that involves investigation and evaluation of their own patient care, appraisal and assimilation of scientific evidence and improvement in patient care.
4. Interpersonal and communication skills that result in effective information exchange with patients, their families and other health professionals.
5. Professionalism, as manifested through a commitment to carrying out professional responsibilities, adherence to ethical principles and sensitivity to a diverse patient population.
6. Systems-based practice, as manifested by demonstration of an awareness of and responsiveness to the larger system of health care and to use systems resources to provide care of optimal value.

To accomplish the above, we divided the curricula into two sections:

1. Venues - Teaching occurs via several methods. These range from formal didactic lectures to learning by an apprenticeship relationship with mentors. A venue is a term used to divide these teaching types into categories and then to describe the categories. Under the venues heading we list and describe the 12 categories here at UTMCK.
2. Curricular Areas - The actual information we wish to teach Internal Medicine Residents can be divided into topics which we have named curricular areas. These areas include not only the traditional fields such as Cardiology, but some of the newer areas such as Evidence Based Medicine. Under each of the 16 headings the curricula area is described in a format that covers the material presented over the entire 3-year program.

For more information on the process we have used to develop this task and for information on ongoing projects please contact Dr. Kim Morris at kmorris@mc.utmck.edu.