Elective

Infectious Disease

Care for a wide variety of patients, with particular attention to evaluating those with possible infections, then diagnosing and treating them.

This elective will help you develop a core understanding of the clinical manifestations, pathophysiology and management of infectious diseases and systemic diseases. Through your training you will develop expertise in relevant basic and clinical science topics.

Our teaching emphasizes rigorous data accumulation when taking histories and conducting physical examinations, and interpreting a wide variety of laboratory data, including cultures, imaging and other tests.

Develop and Refine Essential Skills

You will be responsible for the performance of inpatient consultations as well as the continued follow-up of these patients during their hospitalization. Through this experience, you will develop and refine their skills essential for the clinical evaluation of patients with infectious diseases.

These skills include the development of appropriate differential diagnoses, assessment of the need for hospitalization, diagnostic evaluation strategies and treatment plans. 

You will also develop skills in providing consultation services, to include communicating with the referring physicians and ensuring support for continuing care of the patients’ medical problems. 

You may also participate actively in the teaching activities of the consultation team. Through this experience you will develop a comprehensive understanding of diagnostic microbiology techniques, as well as the interpretation of results. You will also acquire the knowledge of and skill in educating patients about their medical problems. You will be supervised by Infectious Disease faculty and fellows. Ongoing faculty supervision is required to develop these skills.

You are expected to perform literature research on topics appropriate to the case at hand and make your findings available to the primary care team. In turn, you may teach and supervise junior trainees on the primary care team and on the Infectious Diseases service with regard to pertinent medical information.

At each institution, it is expected that residents will write consultation notes on the patients they are following after the patient has been presented to the attending Infectious Diseases physician and a differential diagnosis and management plan have been formulated.

Didactics

The Infectious Diseases Clinical Conference is attended each week by all residents rotating through Infectious Disease, as well as all fellows and medical students on rotation. In addition, conference is attended by all ID faculty members and by a wide variety of infectious diseases specialists in the community and non-ID practitioners in the hospital.

Each week, the conference has two major components:

  • educational (didactic, case presentation)
  • clinical discussion (problem-based learning)

The fellows and faculty present cases, including pertinent radiographic studies and histopathology.

Years Taken

  • PGY-2, PGY-3 or PGY-4

Length of Rotation

4 weeks