The Family Medicine Residency Program at E. A. Conway Medical Center utilizes a unique combination of resources. First, at E. A. Conway there are no other primary care residencies with whom Family Practice Residents must share educational opportunities. The close relationship which exists with our mother institution, LSU Medical Center in Shreveport, provides a depth of subspecialists readily available for consultation in management of especially complex medical problems. Our distance from Shreveport (90 miles) enables our residents to manage cases which in many institutions would be transferred to other services. This leads to the opportunity to learn by doing rather than learning by observation. In the long run, we believe that physicians are most comfortable with those things which they have learned by doing.
A second strength of the program at E. A. Conway is the diversity of faculty. The Family Medicine Department at E.A. Conway is composed of Board Certified Family Physicians and Internists. The close personal and working relationships among the faculty and between the faculty and the residents create a milieu which is conducive to medical education.
The Family Medicine Residency Program accepted its first residents in 1982. The residency plays an integral role in the hospital's provision of health care to a medically underserved population of more than 300,000. There is a tremendous opportunity to see a diversity of pathology in the full spectrum of its clinical stages. Under appropriate faculty supervision, the residents step into an environment high in both clinical exposure and responsibility from the first month. This environment ensures that each resident's fund of medical knowledge, clinical judgement, and procedural skills are progressively enlarged and developed.
Family Practice, like the whole of medicine, is undergoing a dynamic, evolutionary change. The diversity of Family Practice programs, all espousing similar objectives, can be attributed to a variety of factors both intrinsic and extrinsic to the programs themselves. Ultimately each of us has some vision of what may be the ideal and another of what may be required of us in the future. While some of our graduates may find themselves over-prepared for their particular practice environment, comprehensive training is critical for those practicing in rural areas, and it also ensures greater practice options for all of our graduates. It is the conviction of this program that it is better to be over-prepared during residency rather than to wish one's preparation had been more thorough.
Close examination of the Curriculum will show that the resident has an increasing amount of elective time and an increasing number of Family Practice Clinics as they progress through the residency. The resident is expected to use his choices to build on his developing medical competence. We believe that office practice will become increasingly important in the future. In addition to colposcopy, LEEP, and flexible sigmoidoscopy, a variety of procedures are routinely performed in Family Practice Clinic.
At the same time "hands on" clinical experience is being obtained, the "art" of medicine as it relates to the psychosocial aspects of patient care are being addressed. Formal didactic lectures, supplemented by fiberoptic links to conferences presented at LSU in Shreveport, ensure that the scholarly component of medicine is included. Such areas as practice management, ethics, and community medicine, all essential ingredients of medicine in the 1990's, are also addressed.
Regular resident meetings are held once a month, with the residency director being invited to the last half of the meeting. As part of an ongoing quality improvement effort, residents are asked to evaluate the staff, the rotations, and the program in specifics. The program has put increasing effort into this ongoing program of feedback and both residents and staff believe this has been beneficial to the Residency Program.
If, after reviewing the information provided here, any questions remain about the structure and setting of our program we invite you to specifically submit any questions either on the net via e-mail, by calling Dr. Euil Luther at (318) 330 7650, or by writing:
Questions submitted by e-mail will be answered by e-mail. Anonymous questions or comments are welcome and will, if recurrent, be addressed by future editions to the website.
Next: E. A. Conway Family Medicine Curriculum 2004
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Page by: Ed Kintzing, M.D.
Last updated: 08/30/04