Useful electives for FM

[Egg_McMuffin]

Hi guys!

I'm pretty set on pursuing FM. Other than a few, but not an overkill amount of FM electives, which electives would you recommend for learning stuff that family docs will see more of? I've heard derm is a good one. Any others? PM&R? Psychiatry?

Thanks in advance

 

[LostLamb]

Maybe some things which you can do as an enhanced skill year?

palliative, geriatric medicine, community pediatrics, low risk obs might be useful?

Oh, and ER and/or psych ER. I think learning to do good psych risk assessments and know what is and is not admitted to hospital would be helpful as a family doc.

[magneto]

Where do you see yourself working as a family physician? What is your dream family medicine career/practice?

Some high-yield rotations/electives for family medicine would be: emergency medicine, outpatient psychiatry rotation (in-patient is not that helpful), palliative care rotation (but choose a 2 week elective, because 4-week is too long), sports medicine clinic.

[1D7]

Agree with above, psychiatry is probably one of the highest yield since you may not even have a rotation in it during residency despite psych patients taking up a large chunk of your time/volume. Dermatology can be another good one to have, mostly to give you more exposure into what the bad stuff can look like.

[alextrebek]

I would echo outpatient or ER psych, as above. The others that I found to be super helpful, related and interesting were 1) Peds EM (def more relevant and better hours than Peds CTU, with a really high volume of common presentations), 2) Addictions Med and 3) Palliative. A rural FM rotation is always solid too, especially if you get to do a mix of clinic/inpatient/ER/labor and delivery. I've heard that things like ENT, derm and optho can be quite useful but I found these hard to get.