Ambulatory Care Teams: Housestaff are assigned to an ambulatory care team at both the University and Jesse Brown VA outpatient centers. Each team has dedicated faculty preceptors, nurses, social workers, patient care coordinators and pharmacists to share in the care of patients. In addition, each resident is partnered with a fellow resident to provide outpatient care coverage during vacation and during rotations when residents do not attend clinic.

Primary Care Rotations: A variety of non-medicine primary care electives are available to residents interested in supplementing their education in these areas. These include rotations in Substance Abuse, Occupational Medicine, Office Gynecology, Office Urology, Pain Clinic, Ophthalmology, and Otolaryngology. One-month rotations in community-based primary care practices are also available. The rotation in outpatient Geriatrics is very popular and includes home visits, Geriatrics Evaluation Clinic, nursing home rounds and hospice care.

Night Float: The night float intern at the University Hospital covers the general medicine inpatient services from 5p-7a on weekdays and 8p-7a on weekends for five days a week. He/she takes admissions only if the on-call intern is over cap.

Pharmacy Support: A Pharm D is assigned to each inpatient and outpatient unit. He/she rounds with the teams, monitors drug dosages, levels and interactions, and provides teaching.

Research Opportunities: Department faculty are eager to support housestaff in research projects that can yield results in the 2-3 months available on research elective time. Residents generally participate in ongoing projects and many have succeeded in getting abstracts presented and manuscripts written as a result of this experience.

Medical Information Services: The UIC Medical Library serves as the Regional Medical Library and the headquarters for the Greater Midwest Region National Network of Libraries of Medicine. The network office coordinates library services that provide health professionals with access to biomedical information in a ten-state region. This ensures that the most comprehensive and most technologically accessible library resources are available free-of-charge to all faculty, housestaff and students, whether on campus or at home. A satellite library on the wards is available exclusively to medicine housestaff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All resources are computer-based and include MD Consult, Harrison 's-On-Line, Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment, Medline, PubMed and Ovid, which provides full-text articles, on-line, from over 200 journals back to 1993. Departmental resources allow housestaff to download diagrams and data tables for projection at Morning Report and other conferences, and greatly enhance the evidence-based approach to case discussions.

Monthly Residents Meeting: Once per month the residents meet for lunch with the Program Director, Associate Program Directors and the Chief Residents. In this informal meeting, the Program Director updates the residents on program data (e.g. Boards Pass Rates, Match results) and changes in the program. Most of these changes are resident driven suggestions that were made at prior meetings or retreats. This is followed by an open forum discussion about program-related ideas.

Firm Conference: Every Tuesday at noon , one of the 3 firms at the University Hospital presents a case in a unique multidisciplinary fashion. The case is one that is currently in-house, has multi-service involvement, commonly with services outside of internal medicine, and often does not have a final diagnosis or therapeutic plan in place. This conference creates a forum in which residents can hear attending faculty discuss their thought processes related to a current case and it's diagnostic and therapeutic interventions.

Unique Educational Programs: Harvey "Manikin" and Heart Sound Simulator is a life-size educational tool to assist housestaff in honing their cardiovascular diagnostic skills. Interns have a required Harvey tutorial during their Ambulatory Block Rotation.

Teacher Training Sessions: are scheduled at the beginning of each academic year to raise housestaff awareness about their role as educators and team leaders and to help them to improve their teaching skills.

UIC Reading List: The program director maintains a password protected online collection of PDF's of seven years of recent review articles supplemented by prior articles that are landmark studies. Organized by subspecialty and topic, these articles form the framework for evidence-based discussions at Morning Report, teaching rounds, work rounds, and teaching conferences. It is updated weekly.

School of Public Health: The campus houses one of the best schools of Public Health in the country. Residents are invited to work towards a Master of Public Health degree, free of tuition!

International Rotation: Interested students may participate in an international rotation that takes them to the Dominican Republic for several weeks of rural medicine.

Spanish Classes: Interns are offered a medical Spanish course, free of charge.

Sports and Fitness Center: The newly renovated Sports and Fitness Center is located on campus, provides a variety of recreation opportunities throughout the year for students, faculty, alumni, and professionals in the medical center district. (www.rec.uic.edu)