The Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program encompasses the ACGME competency requirements which include the following:
-1. Patient Care: Inpatient and outpatient care will provide the fellow with a wide range of cases within Infectious Diseases. Fellows will be expected to gather data, perform focused physical exams, demonstrate appropriate clinical reasoning in complex scenarios, establish monitoring procedures to assess needs for changes in therapeutic programs or adverse side effects, apply public health policies to patient cases, and possess knowledge of common ID syndromes/diseases sufficient to devise appropriate management plans.
-2. Medical Knowledge: Fellows will demonstrate growing understanding of basic and clinical sciences and knowledge of urgent and non-urgent Infectious Diseases ambulatory conditions and inpatients thru direct patient care. Through teaching of medical residents and students, conferences, lectures, and journal clubs, fellows will enhance their fund of knowledge as pertaining to Infectious Diseases.
-3. Interpersonal and Communication Skills: Fellows will engage in shared decision making, function as a team leader with minimal reliance upon attending physicians, educate patients and their families as it relates to his/her current disease process, engage in difficult and complex situations which may require discussions of end-of-life care, and learn to effectively communicate and partner with referring providers.
-4. Professionalism: Fellows are expected to display honesty and trustworthiness, reliability in their clinical duties, as well as demonstrate integrity, compassion, and respect in their interactions with patients and colleagues of varied ethnicities, gender, age, and physical impairment.
-5. Practice-Based Learning and Improvement: Fellows will appraise and assimilate scientific literature, integrate evidence based medicine into everyday practice, and suggest and utilize data driven protocols. Fellows are expected to show progressive self learning throughout the training program with an emphasis on learning from any cognitive or procedural errors.
-6. System-Based Practice: Fellows will demonstrate leadership in the management of complex patients, particularly in the ambulatory setting, partner with providers of the "health care team" including case managers, pharmacists, mental health providers and others to provide comprehensive patient care, contain cost and conserve resources while preserving high quality care, demonstrate cooperate management of patients needing outpatient antibiotic therapy, home health care support, and specialized wound services, gain an understanding of the funding mechanisms for outpatient HIV care, and ensure effective communication between providers.
-7. Ryan White HIV Clinic: The Infectious Diseases department has a Ryan White funded HIV clinic. Here we follow over 1000 HIV/AIDS patients regularly. Over the course of two years, through their weekly continuity outpatient clinic, fellows will have good exposure and training on HIV/AIDS issues. To ensure continuity of care for HIV patients and adequate training for fellows, fellows will follow their set of patients throughout their training period. The clinic has extraordinary support stuff including an onsite pharmacist, social worker, psychiatrist, gynecologist, dietician, substance abuse counselor and pear health educator. Additionally, we have a regular dental clinic where patients can be referred to. This comprehensive organization of the clinic allows fellows to have a broader understanding of HIV/AIDS care. The division is also highly involved in research. Fellows will have an opportunity to participate in research as a co-investigator. We have one full time research coordinator who organizes and execute those researches. The Division of Infectious Diseases has an HCV outpatient clinic. This gives fellows adequate opportunity to learn management of HCV mono-infected and HIV/HCV co-infected patients.
