Dermatology education and clinical experience in a community hospital internal medicine residency program

Abstract Dermatology education has been shown to be lacking in many primary care residency programs. We identified the lack of dermatology education as a gap in our internal medicine residency program in the annual program evaluation in 2017. A Needs Assessment identified the lack of a clinical experience in evaluating and treating skin disorders as our largest deficit. A team of associate program directors, faculty, and residents identified three objectives for the implementation of a dermatology curriculum for our program. We identified the development of didactic education, a procedural skills workshop and a clinical experience as our main objectives. The didactic education was adapted from the Basic Dermatology Curriculum from the American Academy of Dermatology. A procedural skills workshop on skin biopsy and cryosurgery was instituted as part of our routine teaching block and held in the simulation center. For the clinical experience, we began a “skin clinic” as part of our residency program continuity clinic. We have outlined the methods used to institute these changes and discussed several barriers which were encountered in our process. In conclusion, we assess our project to have been successful and encourage other programs to consider our framework for developing a dermatology curriculum for their primary care residency programs.