EDUCATION | Family Medicine Rural Residency, Winnsboro

Our program is a 1-2 rural track program, meaning that residents’ educational experience begins at a larger medical center before moving to the rural residency site for the remaining two years. The PGY-1 year takes place at Ochsner-LSU Health – Monroe Medical Center. There, residents will rotate on a traditional block schedule of which a sample is printed below. Residents will complete core Family Medicine rotations as well as a selection of subspecialty rotations that are available at Ochsner-LSU Health - Monroe.

During your PGY-2 and PGY-3 years, residents will be welcomed into our community as physicians at Franklin Medical Center. The general outlook of the curriculum at FMC is this: clinical experiences will be carried out via a Longitudinal Hybrid block schedule. As in many residencies, the academic year will be “scheduled” in 13 four-week blocks. Most of this schedule consists of a rotation named Rural Family Medicine. On Rural Family Medicine blocks, residents will be on a schedule like a career rural Family Physician, during a standard block managing a panel of patients in continuity clinic, taking on a few Emergency Department shifts during the month and rotating through the Inpatient/ICU service for one week out of every 3 – 4. On-site specialty rotations will be part of the schedule to increase exposure to those fields and the skills associated with them. Several electives are also available both on-site and through OchsnerLSU Health – Monroe, during which continuity clinic days will be interspersed but hospital call and ER shifts will be minimized to allow residents to maximize their elective time.

With this curriculum, the overarching philosophy is that spending more consistent time performing the breadth of Family Medicine roles leads to more comfort in all those roles. After all, practicing a skill 10 times in one day certainly helps develop the skill, but after a few months it might be rusty. Practicing a skill every day, though, means maintaining as well as improving!