VA Medical Center - Internal Medicine Residency

The Baltimore VA Medical Center is a modern 324 bed facility, opened adjacent to University Hospital.

Both hospitals are conveniently connected by a walkway which facilitates integration of educational, research and clinical activities.

For more information, see the VA Maryland Health Care System.

With its fully digitized radiology department, the VA was the first filmless medical center in the world. It also features the VA's Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), which gives residents ready access to clinical data, discharge summaries and laboratory results on computer monitors.

The Baltimore facility is one of only a few VA Medical Centers in the country with two large federally funded programs in geriatrics — Geriatric Research Education Clinical Center (GRECC) and a Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. It is currently ranked as one of the top VA Medical Centers in VA-funded research.

Medical Inpatient Units

The general medical services are organized in a team call system.

Each of the 4 general medical teams (Green, Yellow, Purple and Orange Teams) consists of 1 resident, 2 interns, 1 subintern and 2 medical students, and are capped at a team census of 20. Call is also every 4th night until 9 PM with no one staying overnight. A full Night Team system allows the on-call general medicine teams to take their last admission at 6 PM and leave the hospital after signing-out their service at 9 PM. 

There are 2 critical care teams: the CCU/telemetry unit (Blue Team) and the MICU service (Pink Team), each staffed with 2 residents and 3 interns. Call in the CCU and MICU is every 4th day with interns and residents leaving by 9 PM. With no overnight call for interns or residents, the Night Float cares for patients overnight in the CCU and MICU.

The Day Float and Night Teams ensure that residents work less than 80 hours/week on average and have 8-10 hours off between duty shifts. The upper level resident of each service directs the daily clinical activities and plays a key role in teaching first year residents and students. Attending rounds are conducted seven days each week.

Emergency Care Services (ECS)

The VA Medical Center ECS is a Level II emergency center, divided into acute and urgent care, where interns and residents care for patients with both acute and subacute illnesses. On the acute care side, residents treat more medically complicated patients and obtain the emergency department perspective on patients bound for admission to inpatient medical services.  They also have the opportunity to improve their procedural skills. On the urgent care side, residents hone their ambulatory medicine skills while treating the more common ailments of the veterans. Residents are supervised by faculty members from the Department of Emergency Medicine.