Welcome to VCME
Valley Consortium for Medical Education
Family Medicine Residency Program
Curriculum Highlights
Core Content
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Based upon learning sciences principles and Individualized learning plans (ILPs), our curriculum includes all the core requirements for family medicine residency programs. Over the three-year training, our residents complete the following core rotations,
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28-32 weeks of inpatient adult medicine
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8-12 weeks of night float
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16 weeks labor and delivery
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4 weeks surgery
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20-24 weeks in and out patient pediatrics
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8 weeks ER
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24 weeks of personalized electives
Residents also spend over 120 weeks in all three years in continuity clinics serving our diverse patient population.
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Multi-Site Training
Our residency offers training in multiple sites within our community. All inpatient rotations are based at Doctors Medical Center, while all outpatient rotations are based primarily in the Stanislaus Heath Services clinic system. Residents will also rotate with other specialties in their respective systems, such as Kaiser Permanente or Sutter Health.
Paradise Medical Office serves as the continuity clinic for our residents, offering full spectrum care including pediatrics, adult medicine, OB/GYN, geriatrics, pain management, and procedures.
What Makes Our Program Unique and at the Cutting Edge of Family Medicine ?
Below are several curricular initiatives and training opportunities which we take pride in.
Opportunities for Enhanced Training
Our faculty is dedicated to advance residents education and is involved in creating focused tracks within the residency program. We provide unique opportunities to residents to obtain enhanced training, certification and board eligibility status is these areas. These opportunities do not result in delay in graduation or residency extension. Residents pursuing additional training in above areas will graduate on time within 3 years. Some of these areas of include
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Lifestyle Medicine
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Our faculty and residents are acutely aware of importance or incorporating fundamentals of health when taking care of their patients. One efficient and nationally recognized platform for this is lifestyle medicine. Dr Saira Dar 's integrative and functional medicine practice focuses on this and residents have the opportunity to avail this experience. LM curriculum modules will be embedded in the overall curriculum and will be conducted in a longitudinal way. Residents will have the option to sit for certifying exam at the end of training after which they will be considered diplomats of American College of Lifestyle Medicine (DipABLM)
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Maternal and Child Health
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Dr RaeLeigh Payanes and Susan Kraus lead efforts to care for expecting mothers. Scope of practice ranges from pre-natal, OB, and post-natal care. Residents get opportunities to participate in full spectrum of OB care including high risk OB. In addition, Dr Payanes secured grants to launch pregnancy-centering programs which have been a great resource for the community.
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Addiction Medicine
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In collaboration with community resources and local government, Dr James Kraus is involved in training residents to initiate and continue substance use disorder treatment. Residents are exposed to treatment for substance use disorder by our faculty who is certified and trained to do so.
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Care of LGBT community (Rainbow Clinic)
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Incorporated within the primary care experience, our residents are given ample opportunity to take care of LGBT community. Such efforts are led by Dr Anika Godhwani, and Dr Amanda Jamal.
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POCUS
We provide state of the art point of care ultrasound training opportunities to residents throughout their training. In addition, they can enhance their experience by designing their elective rotations in this area. This is in the form of workshops and is not an extra track.
Electives
We will be offering following electives. In addition, residents can design their own electives,
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Sports med
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Women's health
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Addiction med
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Procedures
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Integrative Med
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Hospital Med
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Cardio
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Nephro
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Oph/ENT
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Derm
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Peds / NICU
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Radiology
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Urgent Care
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Hospice/Palliative
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Residency Management
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Community Medicine
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Practice Management
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Up to two electives away, one of which can be Global Health
Medical Subspecialties
Residents attain wide range of depth and breadth of experience in various medical sub-specialties including Cardiology, Pulmonary care, Sports medicine, Gastroenterology, OB/Gyn, Nephrology, Psychiatry and Dermatology to name a few. Rotations involving hands on experience with rich didactics content is incorporated into the curriculum.
Areas of Concentration
Our curriculum allows residents to tailor elective time to the pursuit of a specialty focus within family medicine such as obstetrics, geriatrics, hospital medicine, global health, office procedures, etc. Residents work closely with a designated mentor in the area of concentration and the fulfillment of the training plan is certified in the final training letter.
Some examples include,
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Integrative management of Obesity
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Chronic pain management using multi-modal approaches
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Musculoskeletal health
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Body-Mind medicine
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Healthy nutrition on budget
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Care of a hospitalized patient
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Pharmacogenomics
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Medical aesthetics
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Nutrition based approach to brain health
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Mental Health
In collaboration with psychiatrists, therapists and several resources, our behavior health faculty Dianna Galvan is an leads our residents' education for behavior health. Residents participate in weekly seminars which include instructions to conduct therapy, self reflection, Balint and a variety of didactics sessions.
Nursing Facilities and Home Visits
In a close knit community, our residents are given many opportunities to care for their patients outside the brick and mortar models. They do several home and nursing facilities visits thus ensuring that their experience helps them emerge as all rounder effective leaders in the community when they graduate as community family doctors.
Group Medical Visits
Residents can choose to learn the theory and technique involved with successful group patient care. Our family medicine clinic currently hosts patients in interactive empowering group visits facilitated by residents for both diabetes and prenatal care.
Night Float
Residents join the night float team for a portion of their training each year: 2 weeks in PGY1, 4-6 weeks in PGY2, and 4-6 weeks in PGY3. The team consists of one senior and one junior resident, covering medicine, pediatrics, and ICU. Senior members provide support and teaching to the junior resident as they increase their skills and autonomy.
Self-Directed Learning and Didactics
Faculty join residents for a half-day weekly of didactics & interactive learning. Residents enhance their learning in basic knowledge and practice management by completing on-line curricular tasks and self-directed learning modules.
Primary Care Research
Each resident works closely with our faculty mentor to create and publish an evidence-based clinical inquiry, plus one additional scholarly project. In addition, each clinic team completes a quality improvement project over the course of each academic year. Residents are encouraged to present findings at our Annual Scholarly Forum and other local or regional forums.