Internal Medicine Residency

A letter from our Program Director

Dear applicants,

I know that you’ve all worked hard for nearly a decade to get to this point in your career. You’ve mastered delayed gratification by studying, practicing, and working while others in your life are having fun. Now you’re trying to decide on where to dedicate the next three years of your life while completing your medical residency. I hope that with our website and interview day, I’m able to provide you with some insight as to what life is like both at UH St. John’s Medical Center and within the city near the hospital. I’ve briefly outlined below what I think are the three most important facets of choosing a residency program that meets your needs and interests, and how UH SJMC excels at meeting those needs.

Educational Philosophy
Medical education should be driven by the needs of the adult learner and relevant to their chosen career. I strongly believe that high-quality medical education comes from human interactions and patient care experiences.  We are focused on delivering quality education through patient care in addition to a longitudinal didactics series aimed at filling in knowledge gaps before learners sit for their boards. By fostering a growth mindset in learners and focusing on asking why we do things in medicine, we train our learners to be prepared to answer questions in clinical care as they arise. This is the hallmark of modern medical training. 

True to the goal of developing resident skills in asking and answering important clinical questions, we are committed to launching new and innovative didactic structures that are focused on participation, critical thinking, and collegiality. Our residents have a strong culture focused on learner-driven education and have made it a priority to teach each other as they teach themselves.

Clinical Training
We offer residents strong clinical training in a wide variety of subspecialties in both the inpatient and outpatient settings. Our residents have the opportunity to learn all of the skills a graduating primary care physician or hospitalist would need to be successful in any environment. This includes mastering procedures such as placement of central venous catheters, arterial lines, paracenteses, rapid sequence intubation, thoracenteses, and lumbar punctures. We augment procedural experiences with a longitudinal simulation center experience that provides a safe way to get comfortable with these skills.

Residency Culture
We have great residents at UH St. John’s Medical Center! For years, our program has attracted residents with a wide variety of life experiences and backgrounds. In my experience, I find our learners to be outgoing, empathic, and enthusiastic. They genuinely care about the program and each other. Furthermore, the residency’s leadership is invested in helping our residents become the best physicians they can be. I aim to provide our residents with ample opportunities for their own development both professionally and personally.

I want to specifically address diversity and the program’s stance on social justice. We live in a society imbued with racism, sexism, gender binarism, heterosexism, and ableism among other forms of discrimination. These discriminatory practices in all forms, structural and implicit, are harmful and unjust. It is our goal to acknowledge these fundamentally unfair principles and specifically work to provide an inclusive training environment that celebrates diversity and addresses bias, implicit or explicit, in a head-on manner. To this end, we’ve worked to incorporate clinical experiences and didactic sessions to address these topics.

Thank you for reading this letter and for considering joining our program.

Susan Budnick, MD
Winner of the 2023 Evelyn V. Hess, MD, MACP Master Teacher Award from Ohio ACP

Internal Medicine Residency Features

• Hospital resident service with daily Attending rounds
• Continuity Care Clinic
• Direct "Attending to Resident" teaching
• Weekly board review lectures
• Interactive, Resident Driven/Attending Supervised Journal Club
• Resident research project
• Internal medicine didactics (subspecialty lectures)
• Case studies
• Web-based internal medicine curriculum using the MKSAP online learning course

Internal Medicine Clinical Curriculum

Download Curriculum PDF

Contact Us

Cassidy Lasick
Internal Medicine Residency Coordinator
Phone: 440-827-5566
Fax (confidential): 440-827-5573
Cassidy.Lasick@uhhospitals.org

Contact the UH St. John UHCC Office