Curriculum

The Tulane Internal Medicine-Pediatrics Residency Program is an integrated program that meets the requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the guidelines for combined training stipulated by the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Pediatrics. The program incorporates twenty-four months of training in each specialty by alternating between Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. Our residents spend four months at a time on each specialty, ensuring they are exposed to the seasonality of various disease processes, and that they are well connected to both categorical departments.

While rotating on Internal Medicine, residents work at 3 main hospitals, all within downtown New Orleans:

• Tulane Medical Center (TMC) – a 235-bed hospital owned in partnership between HCA and Tulane University, providing a breadth of services from primary to tertiary and quaternary care.
• University Medical Center of New Orleans (UMCNO) – a 506-bed state-of-the-art Level I Trauma Center that opened in 2015. It carries on the tradition of Charity Hospital, one of the oldest public hospitals in the country that was damaged during Hurricane Katrina.
• Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System (SLVHCS) – a 200-bed facility that opened in 2016 just next to UMCNO to care for the veterans of southeastern Louisiana

While on Pediatrics, residents rotate at 2 hospitals:

• Children’s Hospital of New Orleans (CHNOLA) – a 224-bed free-standing children’s hospital in uptown New Orleans, which includes a cardiac ICU, PICU and a Level IV NICU.

• Tulane Lakeside Hospital –  houses a 26-bed Level III NICU and newborn nursery where our residents rotate. Tulane subspecialists and primary care pediatricians also run their outpatient clinics next door. The clinic management has transferred to our Children’s Hospital partners while the Lakeside affiliation allows us to work with the high-risk obstetrics team delivering children in need of neonatologists.

Our Med-Peds resident continuity clinic is located in University Medical Center in downtown New Orleans. At the clinic, residents deliver primary care for patients of all ages, from birth through end of life. The clinic is staffed by Med-Peds faculty, and is open every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon. Residents attend weekly while on pediatrics, and during their “Plus-1” weeks on Internal Medicine.

Residents maintain their own continuity clinic panel, on an average of 1 half days per week when in Pediatrics and in Internal Medicine, and serve as the primary care provider for these patients. With faculty supervision, our residents obtain histories and physicals from each patient, order indicated laboratory and diagnostic studies treat diagnosed internal medicine and pediatric disease, and counsel patients. The clinic is staffed with faculty preceptors at a ratio of 1 preceptor per 4 residents.

In addition to seeing patients in their continuity clinic, our residents also regularly see pediatric continuity patients in an ambulatory pediatric clinic and during home visits with a local pediatrician, to ensure a robust pediatric primary care experience.

All Tulane Med-Peds residents participate in the BAYOU Bridges curriculum, aimed at preparing residents to provide effective mental and behavioral health care in the primary care setting. Residents complete a set of modules covering topics in mental and behavioral health, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, substance use and addiction, trauma-informed care, violence prevention, and motivational interviewing to prepare them for a one-month rotation comprised of workshops and standardized patient sessions in addition to clinical experiences in child and adolescent psychiatry, addiction medicine (including prescribing medication for opioid use disorder), and integrated mental and behavior health care.  BAYOU Bridges faculty plan to introduce a home visit program for adolescents and young adults transitioning from inpatient to outpatient mental health care beginning in summer 2024.