Since July 2001, cohorts of five (5) PGY-1 interns have been admitted to the residency program each year. The unique design of this community-oriented and community-based program emphasizes ambulatory primary care training in carefully selected community settings, enables the trainee to be equipped to provide not only quality primary care in the community setting but also be a leader in advocating the healthcare needs of the families and their communities.
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The residency program is led by an excellent pediatrics faculty, providing primary and specialty pediatric care. The panel of community preceptors includes dedicated pediatricians with a long history of providing excellent teaching for medical students and residents in their private offices and participating children healthcare facilities. In addition, several month-long rotations have been developed, spanning the entire residency training period to expose residents to a myriad of clinical and social/behavioral experiences which impact the health of our children and their families, particularly from minority and underserved communities.
Creation of such a program has been a mammoth undertaking with memoranda of understandings with participating individual groups and organizations, including several hospitals in metro-Atlanta, specializing in pediatric healthcare, to provide the needed training sites and the diversity of patient volume for the trainees. This includes all three children's hospitals (Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Hughes Spalding as the primary teaching hospital, as well as Children's at Egleston and Children’s Scottish Rite for various other in-patient, ER, pediatric-specialty and intensive care experiences). The fourth hospital, Dekalb Medical Center, provides the residents with the newborn and neonatology experiences at their state-of-the art facility. West End Medical Center, a federally qualified healthcare center, is the site for residents’ weekly continuity clinic.
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