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Hi, everyone.
I'm Eliana Hempel, and I am the Director of the Primary Care
Track at Penn State's Internal Medicine Residency Program.
I'm so excited to welcome you to our website
and excited that you're considering
a career in primary care.
I look forward to working with each of you
individually to try to create a track and a training
program that's going to help best prepare you
for your own individualized future career goals.
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So I think the biggest thing was having
more electives in primary care.
I mean personally I've noticed that I like more continuity,
that I'm more of an outpatient person.
And the fact that I could kind of tailor my training
towards that, especially considering
that I've be doing mostly that after I graduated, really
stood out to me.
We have a very developed and organized track.
It follows you not only during your ambulatory blocks but also
while you're on inpatient rotations.
You have a periodic times where you're
meeting with your outpatient mentor
and able to maintain some extra continuity.
Well, by the end of training through the primary care track,
I definitely think that all the residents come out
ready for independent practice, and to be very confident
primary care doctors, and go out into the real world
and practice medicine on their own.
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It's really an opportunity to see
how someone with a lot more experience practices medicine
and to kind of glean some tips and tools
and sort of expand my own practice as a result. We've
developed a really nice collegial relationship,
as well as kind of a mentor-mentee relationship.
And they've been able to sort of identify areas
that I specifically want to work on in my own practice.
It's a huge bonus, especially for me
being I'm going into primary care, because I have--
obviously, Doctor Hempel's been a mentor,
being that she's available to all the residents.
But having a dedicated mentor and Dr. Link,
who's my secondary clinic mentor,
is a huge thing because you get to see how
different providers practice.
And you can kind of pick and choose
what you like about how they're working
in addition to what you do.
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Even though, yes, I'm on the primary care
track with my other colleagues, our individual tracks
are different, depending upon the things that we like
and what we're trying to enter into.
So that flexibility piece of it, I
think other programs may not be able to offer that.
As part of the primary care track
we also were able to develop our own elective, which
was really neat.
You can use it for education.
You can use it for extra rotation
at a different outpatient site.
I was able to go on a trip to Panama
with the medical students to do some primary care there.
So you really do have some flexibility within the track
to make it what you want.
One of the things that's unique about our program
is I think a lot of primary care tracks
are going more towards the model where you have
to apply right from the get-go.
I think having experience in both inpatient and outpatient
rotations from intern year before you kind of make
a decision about where you kind of want to focus your attention
is really nice, especially for those of us who weren't really
sure what we wanted to do.
So having the time to kind of feel it out and see
if you're undecided, looking at inpatient medicine
versus outpatient, really getting a good idea of what
makes you the most happy.
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For people who are interested in primary care,
Penn State is a great option because you
get a lot of diversity of training experiences.
You get to see a lot of different kinds of patients,
different pathologies.
And it gives you broad experiences
and builds upon that broad knowledge base
that you need to be an independent practitioner.
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