Rotations and Curriculum

Facilities

Mercy Health – Fairfield Hospital

Fairfield Hospital has 211 acute care beds, with 36 emergency department beds, 36 ICU beds, and has over 12,000 discharges annually. The hospital offers a broad range of inpatient and outpatient services. It was recently listed on Becker’s “Great Hospitals in America,” and has also been listed among “America’s Best 50 Hospitals,” by Healthgrades.

Mercy Health Fairfield Hospital Internal Medicine Practice

Our newly renovated resident continuity clinic space on the campus of the Mercy Health Fairfield Hospital features 10 examination rooms including a procedure room, with built-in computers to each exam room. Residents learn the essentials of ambulatory internal medicine and see a wide variety of patients and pathologies in the clinic. There is a laboratory conveniently located on the campus, making it easily accessible to our patients. Residents will be in the continuity clinic 2 weeks out of every 8 in our 6+2 scheduling model. One senior resident per day will be assigned to “Practice Management,” assisting their peers and patients when the patient’s PCP is not in clinic.

Cincy Arthritis 

Located in Blue Ash, about 15 miles from the Mercy Fairfield Hospital this busy private-practice Rheumatology clinic is where our residents have their rheumatology experience. Under the supervision of core faculty member Dr. Adhikari, residents will see a breadth and depth of rheumatology cases.

DeCoach Rehabilitation Centre - Fairfield 

Situated less than two miles from the Mercy Fairfield Hospital, our residents will have their addiction medicine experience at this location. As an important community resource, DeCoach offers medication assisted treatment, residential treatment, mental health care, community and court services to help combat addiction.

Serene Suites 

Located in Blue Ash, 13.5 miles from the Mercy Fairfield Hospital Serene Suites is a Memory Care Assisted Living Facility where our residents will work with Dr. Srivastava who is board certified in Geriatric Medicine as well as Hospice and Palliative care to provide care to a Geriatric population often in need of palliative or end of life care.

Block Schedule

Our rotational experiences have been developed to maximize education opportunities while allowing our residents to thrive personally. Our residents will integrate into educational teams and with no shifts longer than 12 hours our program emphasizes personal wellness and resilience while maximizing educational experiences.

Our program is somewhat unique in that our academic schedule consists of 26 two-week blocks. With all rotations being two weeks in length, residents tend to end up with both a more well-rounded experience as well as having better work-life balance. This also allows for our 6+2 schedule model, wherein residents are in the Mercy Health Fairfield Internal Medicine Residency Clinic for two weeks, have three other two-week rotations (totaling 6 weeks) and then repeat the cycle throughout the academic year. This model maximizes the primary care education while also allowing residents to focus on their inpatient learning opportunities during those rotations.

Resident Didactics

Conferences

Resident conferences will be scheduled weekly on Thursdays from 13:00-17:00.  Topics will include a broad range of structured didactic activities and residents will have protected time to attend.  Attendance is taken at each conference and becomes a part of their overall resident performance evaluation. Residents who are on vacation and excepted rotations (nights, swing shift, away rotations) are excused from conference attendance.

Grand Rounds

Grand Rounds occur once every other month on Fridays from 12:00-13:00 and include critical care topics. These are multidisciplinary and discussion-based sessions which include nursing, pharmacy, and multiple medical specialties.

Morbidity and Mortality

Residents will present a case where appropriate care was not delivered, or there was a near miss event. The focus is not on blame, but on process improvement. In light of this – the services involved are encouraged to attend to share their viewpoint. This is an opportunity for a critical appraisal of services offered, implementations that could improve quality of care provided, and mitigation of any patient safety concerns.

Journal Club/Debate

Interns will present “landmark trials” in a “typical” Journal Club format to learn how to critically appraise literature and how it impacts practice. Senior level residents will present a new article, briefly, following which a debate will occur on whether or not the article should change current practice.

Board Review Series

The Board Review series is an interactive, weekly session led by faculty using MKSAP to ultimately prepare for the ABIM Exam.  During the group activity, questions will be reviewed, and audience participation will be captured.  Audience responses to questions will be reviewed, discussed and if necessary corrected and test taking skills will be highlighted.

Procedure Workshops

Residents will participate in the Simulation Lab at Mercy Fairfield Hospital for common inpatient procedures including intubation, Code Blue review, para/thoracentesis, central line with ultrasound, etc. 

Wellness

4 times a year the didactic time is blocked off for resident wellness time. Residents are encouraged to use this time for personal care appointments (i.e. PCP, Dentistry, SpringHealth sessions, etc). Twice a year the residents will participate in a brief team-building exercise before having wellness time.

GME/Institution

Topics will be presented by GME and/or the institution and include:

Resident forum with DIO
Administrative Hospital Related topics/initiatives and quality metrics
Wellness (Financial, mental, and other)
Social Determinants of Health
DEI
Other topics as determined by GME or the institution
 

Research and Scholarly Activity
All residents are required to have scholarly activity as a graduation requirement. Scholarly activity can be in the form of Grand Rounds, a publication, a presentation at a local, regional, or national conference. Subject matter could include original research, quality improvement project(s), case reports, or reviews among other possibilities. To aid in these scholarly endeavors, we have the support of a Regional Academic Research Coordinator, Dr. Theresa Hageman.