Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency

Flexibility to Follow Your Passion

UHPC offers great flexibility within the curriculum, allowing residents to navigate core values in the fundamental skill set while also tailoring experiences to meet their future career goals. Learn more below about the subspecialty experiences, private ambulatory rotations, and other ways UHPC nurtures its residents’ professional aspirations.

Weighted Outpatient Experiences

Internal Medicine residencies have traditionally been primarily focused on inpatient training. All Internal Medicine residencies are required to provide a minimum of 10 months of inpatient time including 2 months of dedicated critical care experience. Within these guidelines, UHPC approximates about 1/3 of the training will be inpatient focused, allowing for the overwhelming majority of training time to be situated in outpatient ambulatory settings. While providing exceptional clinical training in core General Internal Medicine topics, our program emphasizes the longitudinal relationships formed with our patients, the nuanced subspecialty education essential for Primary Care medicine, and the close-knit learning community in which our residents will be embedded.

Specialty Selectives

The UHPC curriculum emphasizes a multi-specialty ambulatory training experience, focused on the diverse exposures to consultative and ambulatory specialties that develop a well-prepared general internist.  

Residents will be provided a “menu” of tailored ambulatory specialty experiences, such as Cardiology, Nephrology, Dermatology, Endocrinology, Pulmonology, Rheumatology & Musculoskeletal, Addiction, Geriatrics, and more. These rotations guarantee residents the opportunity to gain significant exposure and confidence in managing the most common outpatient problems.

Diverse Practice Model Exposure

UHPC residents will be exposed to a myriad of primary care sites, faculty, and practice models. In addition to the continuity clinic experience and the neighbor island experiences described above, UHPC residents will also have designated time to visit other primary care practices around Oahu. Examples include private offices, federally qualified health centers (FQHC), and the Queen Emma Clinics.

Neighbor Islands & Rural Health

Each UHPC resident will spend one month in the second year and one month in the third year at one of various primary care sites off of Oahu, such as our collaborating sites on the islands of Maui and Hawai’i (“big island”).  This rotation provides residents with firsthand with diverse practice models and populations across the islands, and time to learn from the outstanding physicians who proudly serve these regions of greatest need in our state. The UHPCIMRP program will cover the expense of housing and transportation to facilitate a more enriching learning experience. These opportunities allow residents to not only explore rural health across the state of Hawaii, but encourage the residents to be embedded culturally into the social fibers of the communities. Residents will establish holistic appreciation of rural health and further inform UHPC’s roots within the community.

Continuity Clinic and Ambulatory Blocks

A strong continuity clinic experience is at the core of the UHPC curriculum, and ample time is allotted to caring for the residents’ own primary care panel. The cornerstone of UHPC’s ambulatory training is the ambulatory immersion block. These strategically designed 4-week blocks occur three times per PGY year and include not only continuity clinics but also a combination of didactics, excursions, and/or clinical specialty experiences.

Residents also return for continuity clinic half-days during rotations such as electives and specialty selectives to ensure effective continuity of care between the residents and their personal panel of patients. Importantly, residents will be free of continuity clinic duties when on inpatient rotations, away rotations, and vacation. We believe that both inpatient and outpatient education benefit when attention is not divided in this way.

Treating the Whole Person

As described on our Mission page, UHPC’s curriculum is guided by the notion that health goes beyond the biological. We address this through multiple facets including:

• Native Hawaiian Health Curriculum
• Patient-Centered Communication Skills Training
• Required experiences in Addiction Medicine and Geriatrics
• Experiences and training in immigrant health and interpreter use
• Exposure to team-based care including social work, mental health, and others

Native Hawaiian Health Curriculum

We are fortunate to have access to great expertise in indigenous health. Our longitudinal curriculum will be designed in collaboration with UH JABSOM’s Native Hawaiian Health Center of Excellence. We will also interface with the Queen’s Medical Center’s Department of Native Hawaiian Health.

Residents will be trained in this field through a combination of didactics, service learning, and clinical experiences. Concepts to be emphasized will include indigenous health models (i.e. lokahi), the importance of sense of place and connection to ‘aina (land) and its history, the importance of ancestry, and the value of storytelling.

These experiences contribute to both the skills our physicians need in the clinic, as well as those of self-care and meaning-making that are vital to a primary care physician’s longterm thriving. 

A Broad Definition of Scholarship

All residents are required to complete a mentored, scholarly project. At UHPC, we espouse a modern, broad definition of scholarship, giving residents the freedom to explore fields including:

• Medical Education
• Quality Improvement
• Population health
• Informatics
• Advocacy
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Medical Humanities

All residents will be guided to submit their work to one or more peer-reviewed forums by their third year.