Internal Medicine Residency Program

What Makes Cooper a Great Place to Train?

  1. An accessible full-time faculty dedicated to teaching and patient care. There are more than 150 full-time faculty members in the department who contribute to the teaching program.
  2. Our general medical patients are cared for by our academic hospitalist teams. This system ensures close supervision and interaction of attending physicians and house staff and excellent bedside teaching.
  3. Non-teaching services to cover patients over the ACGME-RRC cap on teaching services.
  4. Emphasis on ambulatory care and the office practice of internal medicine. Overall, our residents spend nearly 40 percent of their time in ambulatory settings.
  5. Cooper’s new 10-story, 312,000 square-foot patient care pavilion provides state-of-the-art patient care facilities.
  6. An excellent, balanced mix of patients. Cooper is the only university hospital in southern New Jersey and hence receives a large number of tertiary referral patients.
  7. A chief of medicine, deputy chair for education and research, and program directors who are known nationally for research, clinical skills and commitment to teaching.
  8. Innovative educational programs like the OSCE for Clinical-Ethical Ability, Music in Medicine, and Literature and Medicine.

Ambulatory Care Experience

Ambulatory care experience is provided in numerous elective opportunities and at many primary care offices. All medical house officers spend one half-day per week in our outpatient faculty primary care offices, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 residents have additional monthly primary care blocks in one of our primary care offices. In the faculty outpatient offices, residents become part of a true private practice and are exposed to the business and office management aspects of patient care. Further ambulatory experience occurs in outpatient block electives in the Camden County Sexually Transmitted Disease, HIV & TB Clinics, and Adolescent Medicine and subspecialty outpatient offices. We also participate in the web- based Johns Hopkins ambulatory care curriculum.

The Night Float System

It is our strong belief that to really get a good night’s sleep, house officers should sleep at home. Cooper was one of the first hospitals in the region to institute a night float system. Our system allows our house officers to have uninterrupted sleep at home during most nights throughout the year. House officers on night float are evaluated by our innovative and nationally recognized night float portfolio system.

The Research Experience

All of our categorical residents participate in research/scholarly activity supervised by a member of the faculty. The Cooper Research Institute was established to coordinate all basic and clinical research as well as education related to human and animal research at our campus. The presence on our campus of the affiliated Coriell Institute for Medical Research allows access to and involvement in a world-class research facility. Many of our house officers present their research projects at regional and national meetings, as well as at Cooper’s yearly research competition.

Conferences

Highlights of the teaching at our institute include:

  • A conference schedule that includes resident morning report, attending rounds, and year-round didactic conferences, based on the science, art and business of medicine. Other conferences include Grand Rounds, Chief’s Rounds, Intern Report, EKG conference, realtime EBM seminars, Harrison’s Club, core curriculum lectures, monthly Morbidity & Mortality-QI/QA, Journal Club and multiple subspecialty conferences.
  • An Evidence-Based Medicine initiative in which senior residents develop and hone their skills in real-time bedside EBM.
  • All of our residents are given instruction in basic and advanced life support. Advanced trauma life support and pediatric advanced life support training are also available. In addition, instruction in computer searching of the medical literature is available and encouraged.
  • A board review course is provided for senior residents to prepare for certification by the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Global Health Elective

The global health initiative allows residents to participate in and learn about the health care system in Ghana. It is funded by International Healthcare Volunteers Inc. (IHCV), a non-profit organization which provides free healthcare to women and their families in underserved areas, as well as education for healthcare providers abroad. Cooper Internal Medicine residents, along with residents and attendings from obstetrics and gynecology, general surgery, emergency medicine and pediatrics, spend two weeks in Ghana, seeing patients in inpatient and outpatient settings.

Sim Man

Cooper has a Simulation Laboratory that facilitates training in both cognitive and procedural skills in a non-patient environment. Sim Man is a full body, adult male mannikin that allows the simulation of basic and advanced life support skills and assessment to develop individual cognitive and team skills. Training scenarios allow repetition of acute crisis situations to allow the learner to acquire skills, and allow the instructor to document competency. This training helps residents to learn intensive care unit scenarios and ACLS and BLS skills in real time in a non-patient environment.

Medical Humanities Courses

Cooper University Hospital has been a leader in exploring the use of literature and music as a tool to help instruct residents in the medical humanities. We recently instituted a very successful literature and medicine course, funded by a grant from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. We also have an innovative music in medicine elective developed by the Division Head of Medical Education.

Fundamental Critical Care Support Course

The Society of Critical Care Medicine, led by Cooper’s Dr. Dellinger, created a Fundamental Critical Care Support (FCCS) Course that is now taught world-wide. The course is given to all Internal Medicine house officers during the first few months of internship. It prepares them for the intensive care unit, focusing on the first 24 hours of management and sudden deteriorations of the critically ill patient. Skills learned during morning didactic lectures are put into practice during afternoon interactive stations. The course has been an amazing success. In 2006, there were 267 courses taught to 3,143 participants in 36 countries and the text has been translated into 7 languages.

Systems-Based Practice

Given the complexities of modern health care delivery systems, the ever-changing systems of medical insurance, and the resulting needs to understand documentation and billing while assuring patient safety and health care quality, an effective curriculum on systemsbased practice is essential. The participation of house officers in this elective enhances their understanding of the quality assessment and insurance process and contributes to the improvement of systemic problems in the delivery of care. The residents attend designated hospital meetings; complete required reading and testing; attend various billing and coding courses; and work closely with hospital administrators. They are also required to complete a project that affects practice at our institution. This can be a root cause analysis of an
adverse event, a quality improvement project, or a failure mode effects analysis.

Resident as Teacher Curriculum

Recognizing the importance of senior residents in the education of interns, medical students, and their peers, the program has developed a formal Resident as Teacher (RAT) curriculum. This curriculum is incorporated into the real-time clinical care on the wards and is supplemented by formal didactic sessions. It covers a range of topics, including team leadership, bedside teaching, leading effective rounds, and giving and receiving feedback. These themes were chosen based on a needs analysis and specific resident requests. Resident-led work rounds are frequently observed by senior medical educators, after which residents are provided with brief and focused feedback designed to foster leadership and management skills that would otherwise not be addressed in any formal curriculum.

Fellowship in Advanced Hospital Medicine

The Fellowship in Advanced Hospital Medicine is a 1 year non-ACGME program designed to provide the trainee with an experience in inpatient medicine and healthcare delivery as a clinical-educator, administrator and researcher. Our curriculum will provide trainees with the experience to be leaders in Hospital Medicine. This includes experience in medical education, patient safety, medical ethics, provision of care to inpatients, the business of medicine, and involvement in quality improvement and utilization management for inpatient care consistent with national standards. The fellow will get hands on experience in clinical care on teaching and non-teaching, medicine consults and palliative care. The fellow will develop his own research projects. There is opportunity to tailor the curriculum according to the
fellow’s goals. Applicant must have completed a threeyear internal medicine residency and be ABIM certified/board eligible.

Information Technology Tools

  • Full -text online access for more than 1600 journals from UMDNJ-RWJMS available 24 hours a day
  • Johns Hopkins web-based ambulatory curriculum
  • A well-equipped conference room
  • Digital radiology on every floor
  • CIS for patient orders and lab systems
  • A web-based ethics and professionalism curriculum
  • Web-based procedure logging, duty hours documentation and evaluation
  • On-site biostatistician support for research projects
  • The Resident Electronic Signout System (RESS), a copyrighted program developed by one of our
    Chief Medical Residents

Categorical Program Schedule

Residents are given progressively increased medical responsibilities throughout the three years of training, preparing them well for subspecialty training or primary care practice.

Preliminary Year

Six preliminary year positions in medicine are offered to prepare residents for training in other non-medicine specialties. The year is structured similarly to the Categorical PGY-1 year, but with more elective time.

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Contact Information

Director: Vijay Rajput, M.D., FACP
Associate Program Directors:  Elizabeth Cerceo, M.D., Anna Headly, M.D., MFA and Antoinette Spevetz, M.D. 
Contact: Laura Chropka or Emily Hartsough, Medical Education Coordinators
Phone: 856 -757-7842
Fax: 856 - 968- 9587
Email: IMresidency@cooperhealth.edu
Address: Cooper University Hospital, UMDNJ– Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Camden, 401 Haddon Avenue, E&R Building, 3rd Floor, Camden, NJ 08103