The required one-month adolescent medicine rotation is a joint venture based at the outpatient adolescent centers at Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center. Interns are scheduled to see teenagers for routine health maintenance visits and urgent care visits. They are precepted by adolescent medicine attendings. Services at both clinics include routine health maintenance for male and female patients, family planning, gynecologic services, and STD testing and treatment. In addition to the clinic experience, interns do one session per rotation in a sports medicine clinic, scoliosis clinic, and dermatology clinic. They spend three or four sessions per rotation (September-June) at a school-based health center. Residents also shadow an adolescent medicine attending seeing reproductive endocrinology patients, and take a field trip with an attending to a residential treatment school for emotionally disturbed teenage girls.
Residents doing the adolescent medicine rotation receive a comprehensive didactic curriculum. The rotation begins with a four-hour orientation that includes 60-90 minutes of interactive work on interviewing the teen. The rotation includes didactic sessions on various adolescent issues including the pelvic exam, STD's, contraception, eating disorders, depression and adolescent mental health issues, HIV, teen pregnancy, menstrual irregularities, puberty, substance abuse, and growth problems. The residents have two one-hour sessions on evidence-based medicine, which include developing a Critically Appraised Topic (CAT) in adolescent medicine.
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