Health Care

After medical school, most doctors go through a kind of on-the-job training called residency. Residency programs have been around for a while, but some recent changes in those programs are impacting not only how residents practice but how patients receive care. So in the next Future Docs story, we take a look at residency from two angles. First, we meet third year general surgery resident Anne Kuritzky, who takes us on morning rounds on the surgical intensive care unit. Then, I join our Morning Edition host Elisabeth Harrison in the studio to talk about the showdown ahead on Capitol Hill over residency program funding and the changing needs driving residency specialization.

Coming up next in Future Docs, meet third-year surgical resident Anne Kuritzky. This Thursday on Morning Edition on Rhode Island Public Radio, join Anne on her morning surgical rounds, and then join me right after for a brief discussion about what’s changing for residency programs and how that affects patients and doctors.

Ed Wing, Dean of Medicine and Biology at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, will be stepping down at the end of this academic year. He’ll return to Brown after a sabbatical to continue teaching, researching, and writing. Meanwhile, the university will launch a national search for his replacement.

A new study in the journal Academic Medicine provides one of the first looks at a program created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010 to train more primary care doctors. It’s a pretty different model than the traditional one, where the government, through Medicare, makes payments to teaching hospitals to help fund graduate medical education (like a residency program for doctors-in-training).