The Southern New Mexico Family Medicine Residency Program provides collaborative, multidisciplinary clinical care services, with a strong emphasis on behavioral medicine. Our residents learn from and work closely with our behavioral health providers and trainees. We have a three-tiered program which includes Social Work, Psychology, and Prescribing Psychology.
Our social work team help support our community in addressing social, financial and systemic challenges. Our psychology team help with mental health diagnosis, testing, and behavioral management of both mental health and chronic medical conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Our prescribing psychologists provide medication management, CBT and other counseling interventions, and consultation to the medical team.
Residents complete both longitudinal and one-month intensive behavioral health rotations, which includes working closely with these healthcare disciplines in addition to inpatient psychiatry. Our clinic exposes residents to hands-on experience working as a part of an interdisciplinary team and prepares them to address the behavioral, psychological, and social needs of their community in conjunction with their integrated healthcare team.
Interprofessional practice is vital to what we do in medicine and patient care. Our residency prioritizes interprofessional education and practice in all aspects of training. During their first week of residency, PGY1s participate in a weeklong Interprofessional Immersion training which brings together trainees from family medicine, pharmacy, psychology, social work, and nursing. During the immersion, family medicine residents team up with other healthcare disciplines to learn the core competencies of interprofessional education and put these skills into practice.
Beyond the Immersion, we continue interprofessional practice and training in every rotation throughout the curriculum. Faculty continue to engage in discussion about interprofessional practice through faculty development and strive to model it with our trainees. We endeavor to put our patients and family at the center of care and utilize our healthcare team to deliver the best care possible.
— WHO, 2010, p. 36
The Southern New Mexico Family Medicine Residency Program places social medicine at the center of its training model. Through both focused and longitudinal experiences, residents learn how, as physicians, they can address health equity issues in their own communities.
Specifically, residents participate in four social medicine-focused rotations – community medicine, care of marginalized populations, border health, and health policy. Each of these rotations gives residents an opportunity to understand the uniqueness of the communities in which they work and recognize the challenges that communities and particular groups of people within those communities face every day. Going beyond providing medical care, these rotations train residents to be responsive to community needs in a variety of ways from mentoring youth to collaborating with legislators to develop “healthy” health policy.
In addition to specific rotations, the residency program also weaves health equity into all components of the curriculum – from general surgery rotations to didactic education. Our interprofessional Health Equity Action Team (HEAT) coordinates the curriculum development and community experiences.