Prepare for your Career in a Supportive Learning Environment 

Our community of residents, faculty and staff are here to support you through the most exciting and challenging time of your life. We pride ourselves on creating a culture that replaces the typical hierarchy of medical education with a learning environment defined by mutual respect, intellectual curiosity, and resident teamwork, while preserving resident autonomy in clinical decision making.  We welcome residents with  diverse backgrounds from all over the world. 

Residency Tracks

Hospitalist 

The Hospitalist Training Track (HTT) within the University of New Mexico (UNM) Internal Medicine Residency Program is designed to provide residents interested in hospital medicine with training and exposures to principles and topics within the specialty beyond the existing residency curriculum. 

Primary Care 

The Primary Care Track was created in 2010 by a group of residents to provide robust training in ambulatory care and chronic disease management. Four residents from each class may choose to enter the track at the end of their intern year; the curriculum is embedded into the traditional R2 and R3 years. 

Integrative Medicine 

The Integrative Medicine Track is the first of its kind in the United States, demonstrating the innovation and flexibility of the program.  The program takes a proactive approach to meeting the health care needs by providing an opportunity for residents to focus on prevention and wellness as an antidote for the nation’s health care crisis. 

Engaging Curriculum

Residents have multiple opportunites for learning in afternoon reports, Internal Medicine Grand Rounds, Hospitalist Best Practices, Morbidity and Mortality Conference, journal clubs and our own academic half day. 

We offer protected academic half day on Thursday afternoons for residents to engage with our internal medicine curriculum. The first eight weeks of the academic year cover core topics in internal medicine for interns.  Each month is dedicated to a different subject, including medicine sub-specialties, residents as educators, and board review.

Created by our faculty, this curriculum includes weekly, case-based modules covering foundational inpatient topics. Our ward teams complete these interactive modules that also feature board review style questions on their call days. 

These weekly, case-based discussions take place during continuity clinic and cover core primary care topics. 

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the Department of Internal Medicine require that all categorical internal medicine residents complete a scholarly activity in order to complete residency training.

This requirement is intended to enhance the house officer's understanding of a clinical area and/or research methodology, including design, implementation, interpretation, and presentation of results. There are no restrictions regarding the location of your project. 
 
The research project can take place at any time during the residency in blocks of time of one-month, serial months, or concurrently with regular clinical rotations. Up to three months could be granted for a well-designed project. The house officer is still responsible for any regularly scheduled patient care requirements such as continuity clinics, even if a block of time is used for the project. 

All house officers will be required to present the results of their project in the form of a poster or oral presentation and/or written manuscript. This presentation could be at the annual regional meetings of the American College of Physicians or the Mountain West Society of General Internal Medicine, the Carmel meeting, or at a national meeting. 
 
Each year a house officer who has done an exceptional job on a project is awarded the Excellence In Research award. 

UNM School of Medicine  has a wealth of resources to support your research and scholarly activity projects. 

  •  The  Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center (HSLIC) offers an extensive collection of materials appropriate for today’s medical research, along with dedicated medical research librarians to support your literature review and research needs. . 
  • See the wide range of backgrounds and expertise in our faculty who can be mentors and have ongoing research projects (Link to faculty profile page) 
  • Biostatistics support through CTSC. Up to 5 hours. https://hsc.unm.edu/research/ctsc/ 
  • Access to Red Cap for surveys 

Quality Improvement Chief Residents at UNM and the VA assits residents with quality improvement activities in their continuity clinics and inpatient settings to provide high quality patient care.

QI Curriculum is part of Thursday School programming. Morbidity & Mortality Conference is structured to be systems-based QI activity.

Innovative Rotations

Our program allows the flexibility and autonomy for residents to create their own electives such as medical education, transplant medicine, renal pathology, and radiation oncology.

In addition to standard medicine subspecialties and outpatient electives (like dermatology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, women’s health), we also are very proud of our non-traditional electives. These include medical economics, palliative care, integrative medicine, transfusion medicine, and heme-pathology.

Off-site locations for our residents allow them to see and experience Internal Medicine outside of the traditional academic setting. This includes hospitalist rotations at urban and rural sites in New Mexico as well as rotations on the Navajo Nation.

Opportunities to pursue research your intern year allow preparation for applying for fellowship your second year. All categorical residents complete a Scholarly Project and many of our residents do several. For those who want to complete more in-depth projects, residents can complete up to three months of research electives.

What do I like about the program? The people!!! My co-residents and the attendings are great to work with and supportive. Great exposure for education.
— Aaron Jones, DO, Residency Class of 2022