Program Mission (as written by our residents)

Our mission is to produce diverse physician primary care leaders who provide exceptional primary care in urban, under-resourced communities and who reduce social inequities in our healthcare system through health promotion, advocacy, and/or research.

Overview

The Johns Hopkins Urban Health Internal Medicine Primary Care Track (UH IM), the primary care track of the Osler Medical Residency, produces primary care leaders who improve the health of vulnerable, urban populations. Caring for vulnerable patients who live in urban settings requires a willingness to pioneer alternative care delivery models and a desire to master additional patient care, medical knowledge (including a nuanced understanding of the social determinants of health), communication, practice-based learning, professionalism, and inter-professional teamwork skills--including collaboration with community health workers, and community outreach and advocacy.

Overall, the UH IM curriculum equips residents with the skills to tackle the variety of ambulatory problems that we encounter in our East Baltimore community both on a patient and systems level. UH IM produces graduates who are experts in enhancing patients' self-management and care-seeking skills. Johns Hopkins offers residents training in internal medicine, public health, adolescent medicine, and psychiatry that are unmatched. In addition, Hopkins affords rich resources for training resident physicians to care for patients with substance use disorders, homelessness, sexually transmitted diseases, domestic violence, HIV, Hepatitis C, behavioral and mental health issues. These resources, coupled with its outstanding research opportunities in health disparities, public health, and general internal medicine, makes Johns Hopkins uniquely positioned to train future primary care leaders in urban health. Combining the core internal medicine curriculum with specialized training in urban health produces exceptionally well-trained urban primary care practitioners.

In addition, our Tuesday urban health noon conference series and academic half-days emphasizes clinical primary care, racism and health disparities, implicit bias, social determinants of health, policy, advocacy, high value care, quality improvement/patient safety, evidence-based practice, palliative care, immigrant health, and practice management topics to name a few. Our residents receive essential training in cultural humility, motivational interviewing, and trauma-informed care. Residents lead our academic half days that take place every other Tuesday morning from 9AM to noon. Residents teach each other about urban health topics for which they have a passion.

Program Characteristics

• Four residents per year for a total of 12 resident physicians
• Residents are board-eligible in Internal Medicine after three years
• Residents practice in a federally qualified health center continuity clinic with IM faculty preceptors
• X+Y schedule
• Core UH rotations start in the first year of residency
• We maximize outpatient training opportunities and time in continuity clinic
• All residents complete our eight core urban health rotations and still have time for many electives/research
• All residents complete buprenorphine X waiver training and care for patients with substance use disorders in clinic
• All residents can receive funding to pay for their individual medical license and DEA number if they plan to prescribe buprenorphine during residency
• Weekly UH noon conferences
• Every other week academic half days
• Quarterly UH book clubs
• Frequent social events for the track and the categorical program
• Full integration into the categorical programs
• Frequent social events with the categorical programs
• Prospective personal days for health and self care needs
• We make appointments for our interns for visits with the dentist, primary care physician, and mental health check in.
• Residents are part of our larger urban health community (including the Med-Peds program and the pediatrics health equity track) and have colleagues that share similar values and aspirations

Leaders in Urban Health Primary Care

The goal of the residency is to create leaders in urban health primary care. We imagine our graduates following many different leadership paths. Among these are, in random order:

1. Office medical director of a primary care clinic
2. Chief medical office of a federally qualified health center (FQHC)
3. Clinician-Educator for future primary care providers
4. Primary care researcher (research in health disparities, health services, education, etc.)
5. Policy maker on local, state, or national levels
6. Director of non-governmental advocacy organization
7. Community-based participatory researcher
8. Other primary care careers and leadership aspirations.

Mentorship

Finding a career mentor for you is one of our top priorities. The world-class mentorship found at Johns Hopkins and Baltimore City is ready to serve you. Mentors include our GIM clinician-investigators, GIM clinician-educators, School of Public Health professors, Johns Hopkins Community Physicians leaders, and members of the Urban Health Institute. The city and state boast top-notch policy makers, and the program has many friends and alumni in Washington, DC. The CEOs and CMOs at our FQHC collaborators are eager and willing to take you under their wing. We work with you to understand your career goals and to match you with like-minded mentors.

Life after Residency

As residents near completion of the three-year residency, we are delighted to help them enter the next phase of their careers. Finding a career mentor is the first step. The next step can include, for example, helping you to find a primary care job at a FQHC or an academic center like Hopkins, obtain a position in a health department, or provide care at Health Care for the Homeless. We will help our research-oriented residents match to GIM, Adolescent, Addiction, and NCSP fellowship positions. Our goal is to develop leaders in primary care, in whatever form that may take.