Q: What is one of the strengths of the program?
A: Having a smaller (5-5-5) program allows for us to form close bonds, making us a “work family.” We have a much larger number of faculty compared to the number of residents, so each resident receives individualized attention through advisor pairings, fellowship tracks, and overall better accessibility to attending physicians.
Q: What is the outpatient Family Medicine population like?
A: As residents, we see our patients in the same office as our attendings—Family Medicine at Monument Square. This means that the faculty and residents see patients side-by-side, which is a definite strength of our program. The patients at Family Medicine at Monument Square are a diverse group and represent our community in many ways.
Age—We care for all ages from newborns to the elderly. We even provide prenatal care to our pregnant patients and continue newborn care after delivery.
Ethnicity—The New Brunswick area is very racially diverse and our practice reflects that. We often have residents who speak other languages (e.g., Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Polish, etc) and connect very well with some of our patient populations whose native language is not English.
Socioeconomic status—We care for patients who have many different types of insurance—private, Medicare, Medicaid—as well as self-pay patients. We have rotations at an Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) and organize community outreach programs for the local uninsured/undocumented population.
This diversity exposes us to the breadth of health issues we will encounter as Family Physicians.
Q: What is the inpatient Family Medicine population like?
A: Our FM inpatient care is at one hospital—Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ. Our Family Medicine service admits patients who receive their outpatient care at our continuity clinical site Family Medicine at Monument Square. Therefore, we have continuity for all our patients by being able to take care of them in both outpatient and inpatient settings. This allows us to focus on making sure the transitions between in-hospital and out-of-hospital care go smoothly. Also, we evaluate and admit students from the nearby Rutgers University who come to the ED and are cared for on the Family Medicine Service.
Q: What do most residents do when they graduate?
A: That’s a tough question to answer because the residents who graduate here do so many different things—private outpatient practices, academic medicine, fellowships, hospitalist groups, policy and government work, industry or research, and others. Another strength of the program is that residents who train here are not molded into one type of doctor. The residency faculty work hard to personalize our experiences and help us reach our individualized career goals.
Q: What are the "Fellowship Tracks"?
A: Because there are so many possibilities in family medicine, our program has Fellowship Tracks for residents who want more exposure to a sub-specialty area that falls within the scope of family medicine. These “Tracks” don’t replace a traditional post-residency experience, but they can provide great training opportunities during our second or third year in a variety of areas—Community Health, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Geriatrics, Maternal-Child Health, Public Health & Policy, Sports Medicine, and Women’s Health. About half of the residents participate in the Fellowship Track program.
Q: What's the call schedule like?
A: Because we have a “Night Float” rotation, the only time that our in-patient service needs on-call coverage is between Friday night and Sunday morning. On average, we are on-call for our FM service about once a month. On a few of our specialty rotations, we do take overnight call since we function on that team just like one of that service’s residents (typically one weekend day per two-week block at the most).
Q: How does night float work?
A: Our “Night Float” system consists of working a shift overnight on our Family Medicine Inpatient Service for two-weeks at a time with the weekends being off. The resident on Night Float works with the on-call attending physician at night and with the day team to coordinate around-the-clock care for our patients. This maximized continuity of care for our patients compared to a traditional “on-call” system and gives us valuable experience in learning how to handle urgent phone calls from patients, nursing homes, hospital units, and the emergency department.
Q: Is the residency program an “opposed” or an “unopposed” program? And what does that really mean?
A: An "opposed" residency program is one that has other residency programs from other specialties at the same hospital, whereas an “unopposed” residency program does not typically have other residents at the same hospital. Most programs at university hospitals are considered “opposed.” There are up-sides and potential down-sides to both types of training sites that differ based on your preferences and learning styles. At our program, we find it really helpful to work side-by-side with residents in other programs for rotations like pediatrics, surgery, neurology, emergency medicine, etc. We get to learn with and from these peers AND we get to learn directly from fellows and attending physicians in a wide variety of specialties. As a group of Family Medicine residents, we have a well-established presence at RWJUH and are considered assets to the various teams we rotate with. We also have our own Family Medicine Inpatient Service at RWJUH where we work directly with our Family Medicine attendings to care for our very ill patients who we see in our outpatient clinical site.
Q: How much vacation time to residents get?
A: Four weeks of vacation each year (typically divided in two separate two week blocks off) as well as a handful of personal days and compensation for holidays we work.
Q: Where do people live?
A: A great thing about the New Brunswick area is that there are numerous options for housing depending on what you're looking for. Renting or buying, urban or suburban—it's all available around New Brunswick. With a train station a block away and easy access to Rts. 18, 27, 287, 1, 130, and the Turnpike, commuting is also very manageable. Our residents live anywhere from walking distance from the hospital to 30 minutes away by car.
Q: What kind of technologies does the residency program use?
A: Our inpatient and outpatient sites both use the Epic electronic health record that is integrated with the entire RWJ Barnabas Health system and Rutgers Health system. We conduct telehealth services to patients through this system for appropriate patients. Epic also allows us to conduct quality improvement projects with fast, accurate data to monitor impact of changes. We also have remote interpreter services available for patients who are not comfortable conducting visits in English.
