The division offers subspecialty fellowship training. The focus of the training is clinical and academic. The goal of the division is to achieve excellence in the training of infectious diseases specialists. Trainees must have completed two to three years of Internal Medicine training prior to joining the fellowship program. Fellows will spend two to three years in the program. These years of clinical training include exposure to clinical microbiology and an option for clinical experience in dermatology and pediatric infectious diseases. Fellows are encouraged to devote time to an investigative project in clinical, microbiological, or basic research. Fellows can choose from a broad range of research projects dealing with current problems in infectious diseases. The trainee's research is guided by a senior faculty advisor.
Curriculum
The goal of the ID clinical service is to provide primary care for patients with infectious diseases as well as consultation service for the various departments in the medical center.
The division's 3 primary goals are to provide:
- Education of fellows, housestaff officers and medical students
- Patient care
- Research
These three components are vital for the success of the division.
Education of Students and Housestaff
The clinical service emphasizes education with every patient encounter. Attending physicians review daily the clinical assessment and management decisions taken by students, residents and fellows. Students are given a systemic approach to infectious diseases and are encouraged to study individual infections in depth. In addition to conferences, students and residents are encouraged to undertake a reading program that covers the principles of antimicrobial therapy and the diagnosis and management of common infectious diseases. Members of the infectious diseases division have daily contact with the medical teams on the consultation clinical services as well as with the primary teams caring for a number of patients admitted under ID attendings. The teams are constituted of third and fourth year medical students, interns, and a resident. As well, an infectious diseases attending is often assigned to round on the internal medicine ward every month. This permits many opportunities for the third year medical students rotating on internal medicine to learn about infectious diseases.
Education of Fellows
- Daily attending rounds
- Primary outpatient Clinic
- Shadowing outpatient clinics with attendings
- Microbiology training
- Research
The infectious diseases division has four to five fellows per year who spend two to three years in training. The infectious diseases service responds daily to consultation in the hospital, outpatient department, and the emergency department. Daily rounds with the ID attendings are done where teaching of the appropriate management and the basics of infectious diseases are stressed. The service is divided in 3 clinical services according to geographic distribution. One of the services is dedicated to the immunocompromised hosts, predominantly the oncology patients and those undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Each of these services is run by an attending physician, a fellow and a group of students and house staff officers doing elective rotations. The fellows have an outpatient infectious diseases clinic where patients with various infectious diseases are seen. This also serves as a continuity clinic for HIV infected patients, where the fellows learn about the management of HIV infection and its complications.
The activities of the infectious diseases division include weekly case conferences as well as journal clubs every other week. The fellows prepare these conferences and discuss them in depth. In addition a weekly core curriculum lecture is presented by various members of the adult and pediatric division.
Each fellow spends one month in the microbiology laboratory. This allows a better understanding of the principles of microbiology and permits the fellows to learn about the appropriate culturing techniques, the interpretation of cultures and susceptibility results. Fellows will also be asked to spend a week in the serology laboratory to have hands-on experience with serology testing including molecular diagnostic methods. Fellows are given the opportunity to do elective rotations in pediatric ID or dermatology.
The fellows are expected to perform research during their training. The area of investigation could be in clinical microbiology, clinical infectious disease or basic research. The field of research should be within the scope of academic infectious diseases. The fellow will be working under the guidance of a faculty member from AUBMC who could be in, or outside, the ID division. Financial support for the research project will be sought from internal or external funds.
For more information, kindly visit the Graduate Medical Education (GME)
website.