Response: Re: Trends in physician house calls to medicare beneficiaries

摘要

To the Editor: As a relatively recent family medicine residency graduate, I experienced firsthand how the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's (ACGME) requirement of 2 house calls was usually fulfilled. I and most of my fellow residents made our house calls late in our third year, and the training consisted of being told where the "house call bag" was and to make sure we documented the visit. This was certainly not sufficient preparation for incorporating house calls into practice but rather "checking the box" so as to not incur ACGME citations. I agree with the author that a national house call curriculum for family medicine residencies would be a wonderful resource. There seemed to be momentum for strengthening geriatric training in family medicine when, 10 years ago, Family Medicine published 4 articles on the state of geriatrics training. Overall conclusions from these studies were that the Residency Review Committee's downgrading of geriatrics training requirements from "must" to "should" were met with the expected responses of deemphasizing geriatrics education. Barriers to geriatric education, not to mention house calls, include limited geriatric faculty and competing curricular demands.