Teaching Practices
Inpatient medicine experience for residents includes rotations with two inpatient teaching practices. One is located at Strong Memorial Hospital and focuses on general medicine and hematology/oncology. The other, with a focus on general medicine, is at nearby Highland Hospital.
Strong Memorial Hospital Inpatient Teaching Practices
The resident teams at Strong are divided into two teaching practices. The general medicine teaching practice includes five resident teams, each working with a full-time general 
medicine hospitalist. The hematology/oncology teaching practice includes one PGY3, two PGY-2s, and two PGY-1s. As a team, they care for patients of full-time hematology/oncology faculty.
General medicine teaching practice: The hospitalist is the attending physician of record for most of the team's patients, and makes daily teaching and management rounds with the team. The resident teams at Strong are two intern teams, with each team led by either a PGY-2 or PGY-3. Teams have an absolute cap of 16 patients. Each team has one "long call" weekday per week, during which each intern can take up to three admissions, so long as they do not exceed their cap. Teams also have "short call" weekdays during which interns can take up to two admissions each.
Each weekday, four of the five teams receive no new admissions after 2 p.m., and are free to go home around 5 p.m., after sign-out rounds are completed. The fifth team receives no new admissions after 6 p.m., and goes home by 9 p.m., after signing out to the "night-float" residents.
In addition to the five floor teams, two PGY-3s play supervisory and teaching roles for the resident teams. These third-year residents also assist nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and perform general medicine consultations on patients on non-medical services.
This year we will also be initiating a resident assistant team of two individuals to be shared between the five teams. The resident assistants will help residents with paperwork and scheduling tasks, such as medication reconcilliation and scheduling follow-up appointments for patients being discharged. We believe that the resident assistants will further improve residents' inpatient experience by allowing residents to spend more time on direct patient care and educational activities, and less time on non-educational activities.
Hematology/oncology teaching practice: One PGY-3, two PGY-2s, and two PGY-1s work as a team caring for the patients of full-time hematology/oncology faculty. The residents do daily teaching and management rounds with two on-service attending physicians, one from the soild tumor service and one from the leukemia/lymphoma service. The PGY-3 and PGY-1s work days only. One PGY-2 works days and the other nights; they switch roles halfway through the four-week block. Admissions to this practice are distributed daily among the residents to assure a balanced case load. Total resident census is capped at 16 patients. A hematology/oncology nurse practitioner covers any additional patients.
Highland Hospital Inpatient Teaching Practice
Three internal medicine resident teams and one family medicine resident team care for the patients of general internists, geriatricians, and subspecialists. Each team includes one PGY1 and one upper level resident, either PGY2 or PGY3. Teams have an absolute cap of 10 patients, and no new admissions are assigned after 7 p.m. The teams interact daily with the attending physicians of record for each of their patients. They also do teaching rounds three times a week where the focus is on improvement of bedside skills.
One of the four teams is on "long call" every day, and accepts up to five new admissions. The team goes home around 9 p.m., after signing out to night-float personnel. The other three teams go home around 5 p.m., after sign-out rounds.
