Thank you for your interest in the Zucker School of Medicine/Northwell Health at Mather Hospital’s Internal Medicine Residency Program.  At Mather, our expectation is that all our graduates will be not only healthcare providers but become healthcare leaders. Your voyage begins on day one of your residency when you will become part of the Mather family, a family of caring. Mather is a place where staff will hold the door for a passerby and when seeing people who can’t find their way, take the time to walk them to their destination. You will benefit from our culture of caring and compassion and you will learn how this is central to the delivery of healthcare.

The residency at Mather Hospital was founded to train residents to deliver high quality healthcare and to provide them with the tools necessary to implement positive systematic change throughout their careers. Whether your goal is to pursue subspecialty fellowship training, practice primary care medicine or work as a hospitalist, you can be assured that your medical training at Mather will provide you with a solid foundation in internal medicine.

Traditionally, the education of physicians has focused most heavily on the domains of medical knowledge and patient management. While these areas remain at the heart of our curriculum, we recognize that excellence in healthcare requires mastery of other essential elements as well. Consistently good patient outcomes are related to healthcare systems that promote communication and teamwork not only with among colleague physicians, nurses and allied professionals, but with the patient, their family and their caregivers.  Our residency program is integrated into the various processes of the hospital to support the development of the skills required to assume a leadership role in the healthcare system of the 21st century.

The transformation from medical student to practicing internist is a developmental process that begins during residency.  At the heart of this transformation is the understanding that the provision of healthcare to a fellow human being is an honor and a privilege. Circa 43 B.C, Marcus Cicero wrote, “In nothing do we more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to our fellow man”.  Each patient is a unique person who brings with them a unique set of values, fears, and expectations through which they perceive and interact with the world. When we treat people, we are invited to step into their world at their most vulnerable time and are given the opportunity to see things as they see them. Only by accepting this invitation with humility, compassion and empathy can we truly collaborate with patients to help them incorporate meaningful and lasting changes into their lives.

Another crucial step in the transformation is progressing from a mentality of simply studying for the next exam, to a philosophy of “lifelong learning”. When I started medical school, I was told by a professor, “One-half of everything we are going to teach you is wrong, and worse, we don’t know which half!” It is in this spirit of intellectual humility that our program will prepare you to keep pace with the dizzying advances, that seemingly occur daily, in the diagnosis and treatment of your patients. We are also committed to helping you understand the political, economic, social and technological changes that will affect every aspect of your medical practice. You, as a physician, must take primary responsibility for constantly updating your knowledge through the review of the most recent evidence-based literature.  Our mission is to guide you in this journey by making available to you the tens of thousands of hours of real-world clinical experience that our faculty has accumulated over their careers as well as the nearly inexhaustible resources of the Zucker/Northwell Health system.

This transformation is undoubtably hard work, but we know that you wouldn’t be at this point in your professional journey if you feared hard work!  We also know that being constantly attentive to work-life balance is crucial to your development as an effective and empathetic physician, and to avoid fatigue and burnout. We believe that achieving this balance must start with work schedules that not only allow for, but actively promote proper rest and time away from the hospital to be with family and friends and pursue your other life interests. Just a few examples of this approach to scheduling include the use of a night float system to eliminate the need for shifts lasting longer than 12 hours and ambulatory rotations with no inpatient responsibility but with built in protected time to allow for time for scholarly activity and other pursuits.

Equally important is that you feel engaged in the care of your patients and recognize that you are making a real difference in their lives.  We believe that all the time off you may take will not balance a work experience that is devoid of meaning, lacking in progressive independence and filled with endless minor repetitive procedural tasks.  You are here to become a competent internist with everything that that title signifies, capable of confident unsupervised medical practice as part of a care team that shares your commitment to the best care you can offer to your patients.

It is with these goals in mind that every year we enroll a small group of top-performing medical students from around the country and around the world to enter the next phase of their transition to professional practice.  Please consider joining us at Mather Hospital as you begin your transformation.

 

Robert C. Giacobbe, DO, FACP

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Zucker School of Medicine at Northwell Health

Program Director, Internal Medicine Residency