Purpose of PGY ward: Internal Medicine Division
Taiwan entered the post-SARS era in 2003, medical educators reevaluated the current physician training curriculum and realized that it is inept and unable to keep up in this ever changing society. Most teaching hospitals focus on profits instead of teaching, lack in teachers and also lack in teachers with passion for teaching. Young physicians with inadequate training are unable to perform well professionally and lack in communication skills. The harsh medical environment produces young physicians that rather pick less complicated subspecialties, avoid upholding the idea of patient’s interests before his own interests and threaten traditional values that were once regarded as most important. Nowadays young physicians lack social and public responsibilities and are unable to fulfill the expectations of the public. Under the present circumstances, the Taiwan health department and the medical directors implemented a holistic approach to overall health care and started a program to reform medical education in hopes to improve healthcare services and to satisfy the needs of the changing social environment.
The Ministry of Health proposed a “holistic health care program” to provide patients with equal medical opportunities with appropriate and accessible healthcare with emphasis on community healthcare availability and providing well-rounded and continuous healthcare. Since holistic care is the trend of the future, our hospital began the general internal medicine division of the PGY training program in August of 2005. We hold morning meetings, chart rounds, journal meetings, combined meetings to train PGY doctors, and familiarize them with common internal medicine diseases and symptoms, including ECG and other medical image interpretations, utilize evidence-based medicine to give the best medical care, and also interact with social workers, lawyers and community members to discuss medicine, ethics, laws, medical quality and patient safely issues. We were accredited by the Ministry of Health to be a model hospital ward, located at the 9th floor of the First building, providing 39 beds with our own meeting rooms and staff offices. Our training program emphasizes the EBM center, medical communications workshop and clinical skills center. We train PGY residents based on the ACGME six core competencies. We hold periodic meetings to listen to PGY resident feedbacks and adjust our training directions if necessary, in hope to provide learning-centered training.