Philosophy of the program:
The West Jersey-Memorial Family Practice Residency offers a unique training opportunity for residents in the Delaware Valley in a suburban/urban location only 20 minutes from downtown Philadelphia, PA. As the only allopathic residency sponsored by Virtua Health, we are an 8-8-8 resident program with an educational history dating back to 1979. Residents train in the best of our hospital rotations at both West Jersey Hospital and Memorial Hospital and are assigned to one of two family practice centers--one in Mt. Holly or one in Voorhees. Our focus is to offer each of our residents the ability to become the best family physician they can be with a practice commitment to care that evolves along with proven methodologies.
Evidence-based care has become a popular phrase in medical education. However, at our residency we have lived this approach for over 5 years, through our precepting program and our approach to clinical care. Precepting has become for us a mechanism to enable each resident to achieve their personal best through continual constructive feedback on clinical management, behavioral attitudes, and techniques for improvement. By insisting on use of evidence based care, our residents set the pattern for their long-term learning in the delivery of patient care. Combining this approach with a focus on the skills essential to the development of family physicians has allowed us to create a progressive residency focused on the future.
A concomitant of our evidence-based precepting is our ongoing approach to our office practices. In our family practice centers, we dedicate ourselves to the development of a practice as close to real world as possible. Consequently, our residents learn the critical elements of the business of medicine and the success of practice development from their first PGY1 patient through graduation. At our monthly business meetings, they are encouraged to participate in practice decisions. Their own monthly printout of their patient activity allows them to analyze their financial profiles and clinical breadth. They learn to balance the resources of medicine not only through their own managed care patients, but also through the struggle to identify the resources necessary for their under-served patients.
The West Jersey-Memorial family practice residency will continue our commitment to our mission in Virtua Health, as well as our residents while providing our patients with the best of proven medical care available.
The precepting process:
Precept-Assist™ is a computerized, data-based feedback system, developed at the West Jersey-Memorial Family Practice Residency at Virtua, and used as the principal office evaluation system since 1995. When you are a resident here, preceptors will use the system to enter data about your performance immediately after the precept session. The areas in which feedback is given are structured into three categories:
Knowledge–Preceptors assess your knowledge about each of the diagnoses/problems discussed during the precept session.
Procedures–Preceptors assess your performance on procedures supervised in the office.
Competencies–Based on your individual needs, Precept-Assist presents to the preceptor a set of behavioral and attitudinal competencies unique to family practice.
One of the important results of entering formative data after each precepting session is that the feedback is available to you immediately. This means that, instead of waiting for the monthly or quarterly evaluation session to find out "how I am doing", you, as a resident at West Jersey-Memorial, can see your growth on a day-to-day basis. The feedback provided on-line allows you to see your strengths and weaknesses, enables you to focus your learning on areas of deficit, and assists you in concentrating on those attitudinal and behavioral competencies that you need to become the best possible family physician.
