Departments of Instruction

Department of Internal Medicine

The Department of Internal Medicine provides opportunities for students, house officers, and fellows to acquire training in the broad field of internal medicine and its subdisciplines. The training program is designed to include clinically enriching experiences in bedside internal medicine, ambulatory care, and contemplative exercises in which students, housestaff, and faculty can explore the pathophysiology of disease processes and the physiologic and ethical basis for clinical decision-making.

A faculty of physicians and laboratory investigators has been carefully chosen and cultivated to ensure that interests in general internal medicine, the subspecialties, and investigative aspects of the discipline are represented.

The educational programs of the department are housed at Memorial Hermann - Texas Medical Center, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) General Hospital, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital/Texas Heart Institute, and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. The junior student clerkship involves a three-month period during which medical students rotate at one-month intervals on each of three different inpatient medical services. There also is a mandatory internal medicine inpatient rotation in the senior year. The department offers a wide variety of clinical and/or tutorial electives, including inpatient services experiences, and ambulatory care experiences, as well as a wide variety of subspecialty consultative experiences.  Electives in research also are available in the various disciplines.

The housestaff training program in internal medicine is non-pyramidal. The first of these three years, termed the PL-I year, is devoted to experiences in general internal medicine and subspecialty services, ambulatory care experiences in the Emergency Center and Ambulatory Care Center, and critical care experiences in the intensive and coronary care units. The inpatient services are located in the Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, LBJ, St. Luke’s/Texas Heart Institute and M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. In the remaining two years of the internal medicine training program, the PL-2 and PL-3 residents spend time on consultative services in the subspecialties, in addition to further rotations on hospital inpatient services.

Combined internal medicine/pediatrics residency training is a four-year program, with six months of each year spent in internal medicine and the other six months in pediatrics. On completion of this training program, one is board-eligible in both fields.