During the first year of training, residents rotate between eight months of internal medicine and four months of psychiatry.
In internal medicine, residents spend half of their rotations on inpatient teams that service University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Rotations include general inpatient medicine, cardiology, hematology-oncology, and medicine-psychiatry. The other half of internal medicine rotations are spent on a variety of consultation teams like infectious disease, nephrology, pulmonology, and surgical co-management; in outpatient settings like allergy-immunology, endocrinology, cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, neurology, pulmonology, rheumatology, geriatrics, palliative care, and the emergency room; and on night internal medicine rotations.
In psychiatry, residents rotate through the inpatient psychiatry teams that cover the geriatric psychiatry unit, eating and mood disorders unit, and psychotic disorders unit at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Residents also cover the general inpatient unit at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
In addition to these rotations, residents also maintain a panel of patients in an outpatient setting through a continuity of care clinic at University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics or the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Continuity of Care Clinics are scheduled every Y week (occurring for one week between four-week-long rotations). During inpatient psychiatry rotations, residents are scheduled for one half-day per week in their Continuity of Care Clinic.
At the end of the first year of training, internal medicine-psychiatry residents will have obtained a broad experience of practice in both disciplines. They will have gained exposure to diagnosis, treatment, and management of both complex medical and psychiatric illness as well as approaches to patients with presentations at the complex intersection of both practices.
Supervision is provided by faculty physicians, fellows, and senior residents.
For a more in-depth look at each year of training, explore the following: