Fourth Year Students

Thank you for your interest in pursuing an elective rotation with the CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency Program. While we would love to be able to interview every student who chooses to rotate with us, an elective rotation with us does not guarantee an interview for our Family Medicine Residency Program.

Please complete the following form below to assist us in coordinating your rotation. Only one rotation will be allowed per student. We will begin making rotation assignments in April, and will contact you thereafter.

Medical Student Elective Rotation Request Form

If you have any questions, please contact us at Maria.Marquise@christushealth.org or 210-703-9029.

• We want you to have a good learning experience. You will be treated as a member of our health care team and be given responsibility commensurate to your experiences and desires. Although we have developed a rotation that will be educational for you, please let us know if you have any special interests so that we can try to address those specific requests.
• Regardless of your ultimate career plans, we believe we have something to add to your medical education. If you are interested in primary care, we hope you gain an appreciation of the value a well-trained family physician brings to a community and to the practice of medicine. If you are focused on another specialty choice, we believe that all physicians are made better by an understanding of the foundation of primary care. If you are undecided, we would be happy to talk with you about making the most important decision of your professional life.
• We want you to develop an understanding of family medicine and, hopefully, a glimmer of the joy and sense of reward and accomplishment found in long-term patient relationships.
• We want you to see our residency program, and we want to help you with your ultimate career choices regarding specialty selection and residency training. We hope that you will see the commitment and skill of our faculty and the quality of our resident. We want you to see how we work together and how we continually work to improve our program.
• We expect you to act professionally throughout the time that you are here. That professionalism includes appropriate behavior, dress, attendance, punctuality, and a respect for patient confidentiality and privacy. Our chief residents or one of our faculty members will discuss these issues with you when you arrive.
• We want you to have fun. We love what we do and hope you will share in that passion. We work hard, but we laugh a lot. Although we are always delighted to receive positive comments about your experiences, we also believe that we improve by receiving constructive criticism; feel free to provide us with your feedback.

You will be working with faculty or senior residents in order to maximize clinic flow and exposure to patients. While working in the outpatient clinics, you will have the opportunity to provide direct patient care while learning about a wide array of clinical conditions in pediatric, adult, and geriatric patients. You will be assigned to clinic one half-day each week in the afternoon (1:30 - 5 p.m.) with daily lunch didactics, as well as, Thursday afternoons devoted to didactic teaching.

During this rotation, you will function as member of the inpatient family medicine service. You need to be at sign-out at 6 am to learn how your patients did overnight. You will be expected to pre-round on 2-4 patients per day (see and examine the patient and write a progress note in Word). You will then present this patient to the rest of the team at the daily morning rounds, which start at approximately 9 am. There will also be a resident rounding and writing notes on patients that you will follow; however, your presentation and progress notes are important for patient care. Please show your notes to the residents when there is time so that you can receive feedback. You will be evaluated on how well you are able to gather clinical data and present this data in an organized manner. Afternoons on the inpatient service are spent following up on your patients, assisting with tasks, and learning with our team!

The second-year resident on the team, in addition to the chief of service, will serve as a help and resource for you. You will also attend all noon conferences with the residents.

You are to be on the first floor, labor and delivery (L&D) at 6:00 a.m. to round with residents and faculty. The chief resident will assign you patients. You will be discussing cases that you will then evaluate. The resident will assist you.

Morning rounds generally last from 7:00 a.m to 8:30 a.m. on the first floor with the OB team and attending. You will then round on postpartum patients. You will stay on L&D for deliveries until 6:00 p.m. While on L&D, you and the resident will evaluate patients in the triage area, the  labor-delivery-recovery (LDR) rooms or the postpartum ward.

You will obtain histories and perform physical exams prior to the residents seeing the patients, as well as cervical and sterile speculum exams with the resident. You may observe invasive procedures that the resident performs (e.g. artificial rupture of membranes, fetal scalp electrode or intrauterine pressure catheter placement).

You may attend and participate in deliveries (vaginal and Cesarean—yes, you will deliver babies!) with the resident. Please note that you are not allowed to perform invasive procedures or vaginal deliveries without a faculty or upper-level resident physician present. You or the resident should seek the permission of the private OB physicians if you wish to participate in their patients' evaluations, care and deliveries. Again, the resident will assist you in all of these activities.

While there is no “overnight” call for you on L&D, we do encourage you to stay a bit late, if there is a patient you have been following who is going to deliver later in the evening. (There is no sense in working all day and not seeing the fruits of “your” labor!)