Kevin Leary, MD, internal medicine faculty at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., is not a hospitalist, although his position with the teaching service is similar in many ways. “My goal in coming here is to learn more about the field of hospital medicine and to meet physicians who are hospitalists,” Dr. Leary explains. “When I leave my role in the military service, I would get a lot of job satisfaction out of becoming a hospitalist.”
Kapo Tam, USCF Medical Center
Julio Rivera, MD, of Ben Archer Health Center, Truth or Consequences, N.M., (left) and Dr. Leary (center) practice paracentesis technique with the help of Nima Afshar, MD, an emergency physician and hospitalist practicing at San Francisco General Hospital and UCSF. A patient volunteer with ascites was present to allow hospitalists to practice the use of ultrasound in locating the condition.
Charles Oppong, MD, a native of Ghana who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and infant daughter, is waiting for his application for a California medical license to be processed and currently works part-time as a hospitalist in Circleville, Ohio, and in LaCrosse, Wis. “Personally, I enjoy caring for patients in the inpatient setting. I like the challenges of keeping my medical skills current,” he says. “I heard about UCSF and its famous hospitalist program, and when they sent me a flyer, I saw all of these topics to improve my inpatient management skills.”
Organizers of the mini-college are attempting to give participants an opportunity to re-experience “what it was like in residency to participate in rounds with a truly spectacular teacher. With the teaching resources we have here at UCSF, we have the capacity to offer that kind of experience,” Dr. Wachter says.
“Those of us who stay in academic settings are constantly jazzed by our interactions with young people, who tend to ask a lot of questions,” he adds. “For many other hospitalists, they don’t have much opportunity to step back and recapture what brought them to the field in the first place. That’s what I hoped to capture with the mini-college. If we can do that, then we’ve succeeded.” TH