The accelerated internal medicine program at the University of Kentucky

Concern is growing about the ability of categorical medicine residency programs, structured within academic health centers, to provide balanced, progressive, postgraduate internal medicine education. Detrimental factors, including over-representation of critically ill patients, shortened length of hospitalization, stress, discontinuity between undergraduate and graduate training, rotational assignments driven by hospital service imperatives, and total costs, may all negatively affect internal medicine residency education. Therefore, an experimental accelerated internal medicine (AIM) curriculum combining 3 years of undergraduate with 3 years of graduate internal medicine education has been initiated by the Department of Medicine and the College of Medicine at the University of Kentucky. After completion of the third year and during the first 13 months of the AIM curriculum, selected students are rotated through an integrated series of educational experiences that incorporate all of the requirements for graduation from medical school and progressively advance the students' skills, knowledge, and responsibilities to that of a second-year resident. Thereafter, the curriculum is similar to that of the categorical residents, except that more ambulatory care and off-site rotations are interspersed to better provide the educational experiences representative of the practice of internal medicine. Evaluations of the first groups of AIM residents indicate that their performance has equaled that of the control residents who graduated after 4 years from the College of Medicine. Furthermore, the AIM residents report general acceptance by their fellow residents and attending physicians and report no undue stress in making the transition.