Our Facilities
Continuity and Other Ambulatory Care Experiences
Family Health Center Ambulatory Continuity Experiences
The continuity experience for the Family Practice residents takes place in either the Les Kelley or Mid Valley Family Health Center depending on the "track" the resident chooses. This experience is longitudinal for each year of the three year training program. The amount of resident continuity patient care time progressively increases from one/two half days per week to four/five half days per week as the resident becomes more senior. All of the health center time is spent in patient oriented activities (continuity medicine), i.e., encounters with patients, record-keeping, chart reviews and consultations. Additional time at patient care-oriented conferences occurs weekly.
At both health centers, residents are assigned patients for who they are designated as the primary physician to provide longitudinal and comprehensive care. This includes preventive and psychosocial health care supported and taught by Family Medicine and behavioral science faculty. To provide for continuity of care, residents are grouped in teams so that coverage exists during away rotations and when health center time is limited for a particular resident.
All required and elective inpatient and ambulatory rotations have a minimum continuity experience requirement in our Family Health Centers of at least one-half day per week. The only exception to this would be an elective taken outside the Los Angeles area. During the required rotations (see Curriculum) which include 33 of the 36 available 4-week block rotations, the residents spend the following percentage of time devoted to their continuity experience in the Family Health Center:
- R1 Year 15%
- R2 Year 25%
- R3 Year 35%
During the longitudinal continuity time, each resident serves a panel of families and individual patients who recognize him or her as their provider of longitudinal and comprehensive health care (including preventive and psycho-social health care). Both health centers share a diverse patient population that includes excellent exposure to pediatrics and womenÐs health. During these years, the resident builds a cadre of patients by referring patients to themselves from inpatient and outpatient services on various rotations. They also accept those patients who refer themselves or are referred to our two Family Health Centers.
Graduating residents will transfer their patients to incoming residents with supervising faculty assisting in maintaining continuity of patients transferred.
Other Relevant Ambulatory Experiences
A variety of other ambulatory experiences are included in the resident's training. During the first year, these include: emergency room rotations and two weeks of ambulatory pediatrics. In the second and third years they include the well-developed Venice Family Clinic rotation, Out-Patient Surgery in the Olive View subspecialty clinics with a private surgeon, an additional emergency room experience, and a variety of ambulatory subspecialty surgery rotations.