Harbor-UCLA Internal Medicine Residency:
Frequently Asked Questions

What changes have been implemented for the 2012-2013 academic year?
Of course, the biggest change has been our adjustment to the  duty hours requirements.  We wanted to maintain our "team" structure on the inpatient services and minimize the number of handoffs on the admitting day.  Therefore, we have kept our teams of interns and residents together as much as possible, and have spun off some cross-cover duties to a night float resident and intern.  We also have not implemented "night float rotations" for PGY1s because we did not expect that this would particularly educational.  Therefore, your night call on the inpatient services will be on individual nights and you will still be a key member of your team.

In addition, we have continued our non-teaching hospitalist team. This team, composed of full-time hospitalists and nurse practitioners, decreases the demands on housestaff because some number of patients go directly to this service.  This means our intern-resident teams free of  admissions after midnight (except for ICU and CCU patients.)  

We started in 2011 (and fully implemented in 2012-13) a Quality Assurance/Improvement rotation for residents, and our residents have really responded with some excellent ideas for collecting information and learning about how to improve patient care on a system-basis.  More to come!

What do graduates of the training program do after they finish training? 
Graduates of our program have entered any field of internal medicine, but there has always been strong interest in subspecialty medicine. For example, our 2012 graduates have gone into cardiology, , hematology/medical oncology, endocrinology, nephrology, and pulmonary and critical care medicine, as well as chief residencies and hospitalist medicine.

With what medical school is Harbor-UCLA Medical Center affiliated? 
UCLA is part of our name, and Harbor-UCLA is a major teaching hospital for the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. 100% of our full-time faculty hold medical school appointments as Assistant, Associate, or Full Professors. More than one-third of UCLA students do rotations in medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and almost all students rotate at Harbor-UCLA at some time.  

What is it really like being a resident at Harbor-UCLA? 
Residents are given plenty of responsibility for evaluating patients and selecting  therapy for both inpatients and outpatients, but still work closely with the attending  faculty physician in making clinical decisions. There are essentially no private patients, so a resident doesn't have to interact with a different attending physician for each  patient.  As a resident, you get your own panel of patients in your continuity clinic, and this  allows you to follow many of the patients you see in the hospital. The patients have challenging and interesting medical problems that span the complete breadth of  internal medicine. You may have a patient with acute leukemia receiving induction chemotherapy on your service, at the same time as one with malaria, and another  with severe community-acquired pneumonia in the ICU. You have responsibility for teaching, too. Your team will have interns, residents,  medical students, and an attending, so there will be a lot of teaching going on at all  levels. As a resident, you will present several topics to your peers, including an  Evidence-Based Medicine lecture, several "Chief's Rounds" discussions at Morning  Report, and a Journal Club.   

Do I know any faculty or residents in the Department of Medicine at  Harbor-UCLA? 
Take a look at our brochure and website for a list of faculty members, and residents and their  medical schools.  

What is the accreditation status of the Harbor-UCLA internal medicine  program? 
Continued full accreditation. At our last site visit, we were pleased to receive the  maximum five-year accreditation by the ACGME-RRC for Internal Medicine. The  ACGME-RRC has extended our accreditation by an additional year, as it did for all programs with five-year accreditation cycles. Our next visit was supposed to be in 2012, but under the new accreditation system, this has again been extended to 2014.

How can I obtain the Training Program Brochure? 
We provide up-to-date information about our training program, including a  description of the program, faculty and resident lists, information about stipends,  pictures, and application information in our brochure which can be found here.

Do you have a Preliminary Medicine internship program at Harbor-UCLA  Medical Center? 
Yes. You can apply through ERAS. Be sure that you apply for the Preliminary Medicine  program, not Categorical Medicine. We will have 4 positions for Preliminary Medicine this year. You should also note that we do not have interviews for Preliminary  Medicine. We will invite some candidates for non-mandatory information sessions.  These are not interviews and are not required.  

Do you use ERAS and NRMP for first-year resident (intern) positions? 
All positions for first-year residents are offered through the National Resident  Matching Program (NRMP) only and applications are only accepted through the  Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS).  

What do I need to complete my ERAS application? 
The deadline for applications is December 15, 2012. Submit the following: Application  Personal Statement  Medical School Transcript  Dean's Letter  Three letters of recommendation (including one from the Chair of the Department of  Medicine).  USMLE Transcripts (sent directly from NBME to ERAS) For international medical graduates, you must have your California Letter before the  deadline for applications.

What about interviews? 
After review of application material in ERAS, we will be offering interviews for Categorical Medicine by invitation only. As noted above, there are no interviews  required for Preliminary Medicine candidates. Because we are a relatively small  program with only 17 Categorical Medicine positions, the number of interviews has  been limited to about 30% of applicants. We expect to have about this same number of interviews this year.  

What's the bottom line?  
Our program is located in a busy public hospital, so it is exciting, challenging, and often  fun to learn medicine here. Your colleagues (fellow residents) are eager, enthusiastic,  bright, and dedicated, and you will find yourself making close lifelong friendships. Our graduates tell us that they are well-prepared for fellowships or internal medicine practice when they leave Harbor-UCLA.