What is involved in family medicine residency training?
Residency training provides future family physicians with integrated inpatient and outpatient learning over a period of three years. There are more than 400 accredited family medicine residency-training programs in the U.S., many of which are community-hospital based, while others are medical-school based. Required training occurs extensively in inpatient and outpatient settings, and each resident must have an outpatient continuity practice. Teaching more junior residents and medical students is the norm, and residents become skilled at caring for ethnically and socioeconomically diverse patient populations, not to mention for patients who otherwise would be medically underserved. Prevention, wellness, behavioral health, and practice management are important parts of the required curriculum.
