Procedures
Most of our graduates use a wide range of procedural skills in their practice, and Valley Family Medicine procedural training is designed to prepare our residents well for this. While our residents learn procedure skills in a variety of settings, each resident gets written faculty feedback as they do each procedure so they know what steps they are doing well and what steps to focus on learning. The faculty comments also certify when residents are fully competent to do a procedure independently.
We teach some outpatient procedures, such as colposcopy and outpatient musculoskeletal procedures (joint injections, casting, splinting) in special procedure clinics at VFM so residents learn through doing the same procedure several times in a row with the same teacher instructing them.
Very common outpatient procedures, such as office derm surgery or minor gyn procedures are sufficiently frequent in the residents' clinic practice that residents perform them in their regular clinic with the faculty preceptor.
Less common outpatient procedures, such as colonoscopy or vasectomy, are often learned during longitudinal procedural electives (although we are currently expanding our vasectomy experience and anticipate creating a special vasectomy clinic at VFM).
Inpatient procedures in obstetrics, internal medicine, and pediatrics are supervised by either VFM of specialty faculty, with similar written step by step feedback.