Curriculum
The curriculum at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center is designed to give residents broad exposure to the core areas of internal medicine. Our program offers a balanced experience across inpatient, outpatient, intensive care, and consultative medicine. With no competing residency programs on site, residents are able to take on meaningful clinical responsibilities in a supportive environment.
Our inpatient training emphasizes team-based bedside rounding and progressive responsibility, helping residents build the skills needed to lead hospitalist teams over time.
Residents also benefit from close collaboration with subspecialty faculty, often working one-on-one with academic mentors. In the ambulatory setting, our medical home model encourages continuity and ownership of patient care. Through these experiences, residents develop strong clinical, leadership, and communication skills that prepare them for a variety of career paths, including primary care, hospital medicine, and subspecialty training.
Schedule at a glance:
* there are 13 4-week blocks in the academic year.
PGY-1: 3-4 blocks
PGY-2: 2 blocks
PGY-3: 2-3 blocks
A substantial portion of your intern year will be spent on our Accountable Care Unit (ACU). This innovative inpatient medicine service gives our residents a "home" in the hospital by placing them on a single geographic unit, which is designed to deliver patient-centered, multi-disciplinary care. This unique model, which has shown improvements in provider satisfaction and patient mortality, also offers a superior educational environment with daily bedside rounds and teaching.
See what life is like on the ACU: How We Care: A team approach to bedside rounds
PGY-1: 1-2 blocks
PGY-2: 1-2 blocks
PGY-3: 1-2 blocks
Our ward teams play an important role in helping residents build core clinical, diagnostic, and communication skills. Residents care for a diverse patient population, including those with cardiac, neurologic, pulmonary, hematologic, and surgical conditions, offering a broad range of learning opportunities.
With increasing levels of responsibility, residents gradually take on more leadership in managing patient care, gaining experience that supports their development in inpatient medicine. The educational environment on the wards is supported by protected teaching time and manageable team sizes, allowing residents to focus on learning while providing high-quality care.
PGY-1: 2-3 blocks
PGY-2: 1 blocks
PGY-3: 1 blocks
The ICU rotation offers residents the opportunity to care for critically ill patients in a structured and supportive interdisciplinary environment. This experience is designed to help residents build confidence in managing complex cases while working closely with a dedicated team.
The ICU team typically includes a full-time intensivist, a senior resident (PGY-2 or PGY-3), three interns, and occasionally a fourth-year medical student. Daily multidisciplinary rounds bring together a range of professionals, such as:
Senior residents focus on teaching and supporting interns and medical students during the rotation. They do not take overnight call while in the ICU. Interns follow a call schedule of every third day, with shifts ending by 10 p.m., and receive one day off each week.
PGY-1: 1-1.5 blocks
PGY-2: 1 block
PGY-3: 1 block
The night float team (an intern and one senior resident), handles admissions
and cross-coverage issues from 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., Sunday through Thursday nights.
Intern responsibilities include admissions and cross coverage on the wards. This rotation helps to develop essential communication skills among physician colleagues and provides an opportunity to improve efficiency during the admission process.
The senior resident supervises the night float intern and the on-call ICU intern and manages overnight ICU admissions. This is a demanding role, but it is highly valued due to the autonomy it fosters.
Categorical intern: This rotation is dedicated to allow the Intern a structured approach to the medical home model of primary care. Time is spent in 1:1 mentorship with their clinic faculty learning the nuts and bolts needed to be successful in the clinic patient encounter. Dedicated time is provided for population management of their patient panel and integration with support staff of the medical home including clinical pharmacy, behaviorist, social worker and clinical EMR analyst. Interns leave with an understanding of their responsibility as the primary physician for their patients and knowledge of how to be facile in the system of the medical home.
Resident PGY-2 (Optional PGY-3): Residents spend one block focusing on outpatient primary care, systems-based management and population health. Mornings are devoted to office-based primary and urgent care in the clinic. Residents also spend time completing cultural competency curriculum, a panel management mini-quality improvement project, and enhancement of outpatient EBM skills with one on one mentorship.
Resident PGY-2: Third year residents spend four weeks in a variety of ambulatory care settings including sports medicine, pain management, physical and occupational therapy, HIV medicine, psychiatry, podiatry, and ENT, allowing residents flexibility to pursue areas of interest pertaining to their future careers.
Resident PGY-3: Second year residents spend two weeks focusing on outpatient geriatric care. This rotation includes clinical work with the multidisciplinary team at Providence ElderPlace, a PACE (Program of All Inclusive Care for the Elderly) program; home visits both to their own patients and with the Providence Medical Group at Home; embedded geriatric assessment clinic in the St. Vincent residency clinic; hospice and nursing home experiences, fall risk clinic, geriatric psychiatry, and one-on-one didactic time with a St. Vincent geriatrician faculty member.
Providence St Vincent Internal Medicine Residency is committed to developing a work force for the future that is prepared to recognize and mitigate health inequities. As part of our commitment, we have a continually developing health equity and cultural humility curriculum featuring the following:
PGY-2: 1 block
PGY-3: 1 block
Providence St. Vincent is a referral center for coastal Oregon and southern Washington, with over 73,000 emergency room visits a year. Residents work one-on-one with full-time, board-certified emergency medicine physicians in both their second and third year. Residents are supervised to perform many bedside procedures and there are ample opportunities to perform procedures and interact with the Providence Stroke Team and Providence Heart Call Teams.
PGY-1: 1.5 - 2.5 blocks
PGY-2: 3 - 4 blocks
PGY-3: 5 - 6 blocks
Providence St. Vincent has a broad complement of subspecialties which comprise the core Internal Medicine Elective Rotations. Excellent relationships with prominent academic subspecialists provide for a varied and rich experience combining both an inpatient and outpatient experience with direct mentorship by senior subspecialist faculty. Residents have significant flexibility and are encouraged to tailor electives to their own needs and interests.
Opportunities for electives in the following areas exist:
We are excited to offer an expanded POCUS curriculum.
For years, our residents have been trained to use bedside ultrasound to safely perform common procedures including the placement of central lines, thoracentesis, and paracentesis. More recently, we have expanded opportunities for our residents to develop their skills in diagnostic point-of-care ultrasound where they can learn the fundamentals of image acquisition, interpretation, and clinical integration across multiple scanning areas including cardiac, lung, abdominal and skin/soft tissue. Our residents enjoy access to both handheld and cart-based ultrasound equipment during their core inpatient and outpatient rotations.
Providence St. Vincent Medical Center offers residents the opportunity to participate in a four-week cardiology selective, working closely with subspecialty faculty in a collaborative learning environment. During this rotation, a resident and intern team manages a panel of patients with complex cardiovascular conditions alongside the cardiology consultation service, advanced heart failure team, and electrophysiologists. The rotation provides exposure to a wide range of cardiovascular care and emphasizes both clinical learning and interdisciplinary collaboration.
The Providence Heart and Vascular Institute has recently received a significant grant to support initiatives in specialty care, innovation and research, and preventive cardiology. Residents with an interest in cardiology may find opportunities for mentorship and involvement in ongoing research projects through these programs.
Our robust Evidence-Based Medicine curriculum has multiple components and includes didactic sessions from core faculty who are trained in teaching EBM. Monthly Journal Club or EBM Workshops give residents an opportunity to teach other residents tools for understanding the medical literature.
