University of Michigan News Service – UM News

First graduates complete new Preventive Medicine Residency

ANN ARBOR&#151A new medical residency program at the University of Michigan School of Public Health is training physicians to apply their knowledge to improve the health of the population as a whole, instead of treating individuals. Instead of learning about diagnosis and therapy options for one person’s disease, for example, these residents look for trends in disease in a community or a country and for ways to prevent its spread.

“It’s a whole new way of thinking for physicians,” said Matthew Boulton, director of the Residency in General Preventive Medicine and Public Health.

The two-year program aims to fill what Boulton describes as a critical shortage of medical epidemiologists&#151that is, people who examine disease at the public health level. These are the physicians who monitor and prepare for bioterrorist attacks, who staff the Centers for Disease Control, and who aid in developing plans for immunization.

Initial participants are just completing the residency, and already have landed jobs in the field. For example, David Persaud recently accepted a position as medical director for the Kent County Health Department, though he will not complete the U-M program until July, while Azra Hashmi has become a faculty pediatrician and associate residency director for Oakwood Hospital in southeast Michigan.

Michigan, like most other states, suffers from an acute shortage of qualified physicians to serve as medical directors and physician administrators in the state and local public health system. Many medical directors cover multiple jurisdictions or serve on an interim or part-time basis. Because of the shortage of available candidates, physicians in private practice without public health experience or training are sometimes asked to provide coverage for health departments on a part-time basis simply because no other options exist.

Boulton understands this problem from both the academic and practical sides&#151he is a clinical associate professor of epidemiology, and he serves as chief epidemiologist at the Michigan Department of Community Health.

Program participants must come to U-M having completed medical school and clinical training, and the preference is toward those who have board certification in another area like pediatrics or family practice. The residents spend their first year getting a master’s of public health in epidemiology. In the second year, they do rotations through the state epidemiology office, learning disease surveillance and outbreak investigation, Henry Ford Hospital, studying clinical preventive medicine and health care quality issues, and the Washtenaw County Health Department, learning community-based health assessment skills. In addition, they choose one final rotation based on their areas of interest&#151it might be the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, or a federal health agency, or a community public health office, for example.

So far, residents have crunched data on diabetes at state and national levels, examined chicken pox data, and looked at the statewide immunization trends, all with an eye on helping populations better maintain their health.

This new residency received $750,000 in funding from the Michigan Department of Community Health, to help get it up and running, and it is also an alternate training site for CDC medical epidemiologists in training. (http://www.cdc.gov/epo/dapht/pmr.htm)

The program is fully accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. (http://www.acgme.org/)

For more information on the residency: http://www.sph.umich.edu/epid/programs/preventive_med/

For background on preventive medicine as a specialty, visit the American Board of Preventive Medicine http://www.abprevmed.org/ or American College of Preventive Medicine http://www.acpm.org/.

To learn about the U-M School of Public Health, which seeks to prevent disease and promote the health of populations in the United States and worldwide: http://www.sph.umich.edu