Career Development: Medical Specialties: Family Medicine
A family physician is trained to provide care to patients and their families with a focus on their community. The care provided is continuing, comprehensive, coordinative, preventive, and delivered in a personalized manner to patients regardless of age, gender, presence of disease or organ system affected. Family physicians engage in a broad range of clinical activities that occur in the office, hospital, home, nursing home, extended care facility and other settings. Commonly performed procedures include vasectomy, flexible sigmoidoscopy, colposcopy, skin biopsy, and casting and splinting. Family physicians practice in geographic settings ranging from rural to urban and everything in between.
Residency training information:
- Duration of training (number of years): Three
- Number of programs nationally: 455 programs
- Number of entering residency positions per year: 2,621
- Types of fellowships or subspecialties: Faculty Development, Sports Medicine, Geriatrics, Obstetrics, Research, Rural Medicine, Substance Abuse, Adolescent Medicine and Integrative Medicine
- Type of Match: Regular
- Overall competitiveness: Not Very Competitive (average student very likely to match)
Primary faculty contact person for M1 and M2 students:
- Kent J. Sheets, Ph.D. ( ksheets@umich.edu )
Phone: 998-7138
Medical Student Club or Interest Group:
- Family Medicine Interest Group
Contact: Andrea Baxter ( baxtera@umich.edu )
Shadowing or mentoring experiences available to M1 or M2 students:
- Contact Kent J. Sheets, Ph.D.
Phone: 998-7138
Resources:
- The American Academy of Family Physicians offers a Virtual Family Medicine Interest Group at: http://fmignet.aafp.org/online/fmig/index.html
Suggested journals, books, or other information for interested students:
- American Family Physician
- Family Medicine
- Journal of Family Practice
- How to Choose a Medical Specialty by Anita Taylor, 4th edition, 2003.
- Regarding background and philosophy of family medicine: any books/articles by Ian
McWhinney or Gayle Stephens
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