Addressing the Primary Care Shortage on a Shoestring: A Successful Track in an Internal Medicine Residency.

Problem: Nationally, shortages of primary care providers are of major concern. Internal medicine programs, once the major supplier of primary care physicians, are no longer producing large numbers of primary care providers to help meet the needs of the growing patient population.

Approach: In 2009, residents at the University of New Mexico created a resident-driven Primary Care Track (PCT) within the internal medicine residency, and after six years this track is thriving.

Ethnic Disparities in Emergency Severity Index Scores among U.S. Veteran's Affairs Emergency Department Patients.

Background: The goal of these analyses was to determine whether there were systematic differences in Emergency Severity Index (ESI) scores, which are intended to determine priority of treatment and anticipate resource needs, across categories of race and ethnicity, after accounting for patient-presenting vital signs and examiner characteristics, and whether these differences varied among male and female Veterans Affairs (VA) ED patients.

Methods And Findings: We used a large national database of electronic medical records of ED patients from twenty-two U.S.

Viewpoint: learning professionalism: a view from the trenches.

The authors, medical students immersed in learning professionalism, observe that most of the professionalism literature misses the mark. Their views on professionalism education, although not the result of qualitative research, were gained from four years of conversations with students from a dozen medical schools, plus online student discussions, focus groups, and meetings with supervisors from five schools. The authors propose that the chief barrier to medical professionalism education is unprofessional conduct by medical educators, which is protected by an established hierarchy of academic authority.