Here is a bit of an overview of the educational programs that we are working on in duke primary care. I am copying Kevin Shah as well, as he is helping us with some educational initiatives for Duke Primary Care and might have some additional suggestions/comments.
So we first of all want to emphasize some themes that are important to us which include an emphasis on collaboration and communication and inter professionalism within DPC. I think we work hard to share information,, to try to work together, and to try to collaborate no matter where someone works ( we have folks in internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, and urgent care). We also try to be super inclusive of all of our providers since we have MD's, NP's, and PA's. We have a lot of different sites as well and our colleague Olivia Jackson can help provide some of our exact numbers of sites, providers, etc. ( that number is seemingly shifting from month to month and we recently have added a couple of new sites for duke primary care).
In regards to education, we have some learning /seminar sessions that occur once or twice a month that occur at some of our clinics, whereby we have experts from Duke to come review salient topics with faculty and learners. We are expanding that process, and now Pickett Road, and Crooked Creek have these sessions and our North Hills DPC site has started as well. We are hoping to ramp up several more sites in the next few months.
We are looking to create some WebX seminars that can be taped and watched later on ( or in real time ). This might involve some taped lectures, it might also involve some of these interactive seminars that are ongoing now. This will be something that we have tried before but this did not gain much traction. Hoping this will be better received going forward.
Additionally at Pickett Road, we have been meeting once a month to review MKSAP questions for internal medicine and recently, we have started reviewing NEJM interactive cases together.
We send out twice monthly emails that include recent high value review articles that cover a variety of topics germane to primary care. We send this to learners but also to anyone that might be interested.
In addition to the above, we are beginning to organize and host faculty development sessions in half day retreat settings . The first will occur Oct 5 and is co sponsored with Duke Ahead. We are also planning to continue this every six months approximately, and there will be a spring retreat that will probably be co sponsored by one of the primary care departments at duke ( not official yet ).
Also, DPC has begun to sponsor individual group learning sessions that are somewhat site specific. I have begun going to some of the DPC sites to work with faculty to enhance teaching skill sets and have been working with urgent care at their quarterly meetings for all of their staff to again strengthen faculty
development and to go over best methods for how to teach learners. this is akin to academic detailing.
We are working behind the scenes to create a Sakai site that all DPC providers can access. this will likely house relevant articles about teaching, and will likely also house the WebX seminars we anticipate taping over the next 6 months. This will be educational as well, and will be open to anyone who is interested,
and will not just be restricted to dpc providers. this is a work in progress, its not set up yet.
Kevin and David have been working on a variety of QI projects within Duke Primary Care to help streamline care, educate providers, and determine best
practices for how we approach a number of medical issues and problems. For instance, now there is a program that is rather innovative whereby patients who
come to a duke primary care urgent care site, can be treated for a blood clot, and can have prioritized follow up the next day in their home based clinic.
We are also looking at patterns of referrals and determining best practices for how we obtain X-rays for our patients.
And lastly, we are very focused on the teaching that is occurring in our practices as we are teaching nearly 100 medical students per year, and also approximately 25 PA students and 10-12 NP students per year. We are also expanding our teaching of residents that come currently to Pickett Road,
Durham Pediatrics, and Oxford Family medicine for some of their training. We hope to expand upon all of those numbers in the next 3 years as well.