University of Illinois
College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign
Internal Medicine Residency Program

Program Policy

PURPOSE:    

To assure an appropriate balance of educational and service activities, to optimize the educational environment and to prevent excessive reliance on residents to meet the service needs of the teaching sites.

POLICY:       

Non-Teaching Services:

Responsibility for patients admitted to non-teaching services is accepted by resident physicians in only three situations:

• Consultation request of a teaching service. The resident evaluates the patient, writes the consultation note and follows the patient as a consultant for the specific area requested.  The trainee does not assume primary management responsibility from the requesting service.  After hours coverage is not provided by a teaching service. The resident is directly supervised by an attending physician.
• Life threatening emergencies.  The resident will respond to patient needs for cardio pulmonary resuscitation and other life threatening emergencies until the physician of record or an appropriate on –call attending physician can assume management responsibility.
• Patient transfer to a teaching service.  When the attending of record requests transfer to a teaching service and that transfer is formally accepted by an attending physician with teaching service privileges, then the accepting attending physician may assign the patient to a teaching service resident for primary management.

 PROCEDURES:

Residents, chief residents and faculty are informed of policy and encouraged to report to the site coordinator, associate director or director any deviation from policy.  Feedback from residents is regularly requested about their learning environment through an electronic evaluation system, regular meetings with program faculty and administration and via focus groups conducted by the graduate medical education committee.    

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