Welcome from the Program Director
David Holub, MD: Program Director
Hello!
The word “EXCITED” is quite the understatement when describing my feelings about the opportunity to succeed Steve Schultz as the director of our residency program. After his 20 years of leadership and service, I have big shoes to fill for sure. My job will be easier having served as the Associate Director here for the past 12 years and, more importantly, by having the incredible team of faculty, residents, and staff that we have.
Our commitment to community health and service to the underserved at both our urban and our inner city residency sites remains a hallmark of our experience. We couple this with dedication to teaching and providing team-based care. We have grown this team considerably over the past several years and now proudly have behavioral health clinicians, pharmacists, social workers, and nurse and community care managers at both our main urban family medicine resident clinic and our inner city FQHC residency clinic.
We offer unparalleled training in psychosocial medicine. Our longitudinal curriculum is spread over 5 months of the PGY-2 year and focuses on techniques of effective counseling, enhanced communication skills with patients and families, self-reflection, and truly incorporating Rochester’s famed biopsychosocial approach into all aspects of caring for patients.
Still delivering babies myself after 24 years, I am proud to be part of one of the most robust OB experiences among family medicine programs in the Northeast. We provide higher risk and surgical obstetrics services to our patients with fellowship-trained family physicians on our faculty and in our primary care community. Our recent $2.7 million HRSA grant has brought a perinatal nurse care manager to our clinic and will expand our surgical OB fellowship to help train more family physicians with obstetrics skill to help fill the needs of smaller and rural communities both in western New York and throughout the country.
Despite an unavoidable pause during the first part of the global pandemic, our Global Health mission is back on track. Our faculty and resident brigade have returned to the rural community in southwest Honduras with whom we have a longstanding commitment. The experience helps prepare physicians both for international service and to better understand how to assess and incorporate social determinants of health for communities in the United States with fewer resources.
Your residency experience can be tailored to your particular interests. We now offer 10 Areas of Concentration for residents interested in specific additional learning experiences. I am proud to note that in just the last 5 years, over half of those have been created by residents themselves with the program’s support.
We are fortunate to have so many longstanding strengths in our program. I eagerly look forward to my challenge of maintaining excellence in our traditional areas of strength – a process that must be done deliberately. There can be no resting on one’s laurels! At the same time, we will continue to find new areas where our program can grow and excel. Planning is underway to expand our anti-racism efforts, enhance our evidence-based medicine teaching, create and implement a curriculum on EMR efficiency, pursue formal osteopathic recognition, and develop an additional rural residency training track that will expand our program.
Our specialty’s time is now. Our country recognizes its need for the comprehensive and person-centered care that you aspire to provide and that our program will help you develop. I sincerely hope to have the opportunity to meet you and work with you on your journey into Family Medicine.
Sincerely,
David. C. Holub, MD