Carolinas Medical Center is the flagship facility of Carolinas HealthCare System . As part of the third largest public hospital system in the country, CMC serves patients from western North Carolina , South Carolina and throughout the Southeast.

Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation

Carolinas Rehabilitation is a 118 bed Acute Rehabilitation Hospital connected to CMC via a 400 foot underground tunnel. This underground tunnel provides a direct and dry route between Carolinas Medical Center and Carolinas Rehabilitation, laying the proverbial "groundwork" for the strong connections and collaborations that exist today. Both facilities (Carolinas Medical Center and Carolinas Rehabilitation,) are part of Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS), the nation's 3rd largest public healthcare system. CHS manages manages 4,300 licensed beds in North and South Carolina and has approximately 25,300 employees.

Mission Statement

The mission of the Department of PM&R at Carolinas Medical Center/Carolinas Rehabilitation is to train residents in all aspects of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Our goals are to produce a resident with broad based skills with the ability to directly enter a general private or academic practice. In addition, skills will be provided that will help to set the foundation for expertise in areas of Neurotrauma (Brain Injury and Spinal Cord Injury), Stroke management, Prosthetics and Orthotics, and Musculoskeletal Medicine.

With an ideal faculty to resident ratio our goal is to provide concentrated teaching at the bedside, in the clinic, and during a very structured didactic curriculum. Our efforts through the years have focused on hiring faculty with a strong interest in teaching, and recruiting faculty within the private practice community to assist in our teaching program. This has helped to achieve our goal of providing training and experience in PM&R that encompasses all potential practice settings and allows exposure for all or our residents to the many facets of PM&R practice.

Curriculum

We provide a broad-based curriculum that is competency based and features numerous teaching modalities including bedside teaching, one-on-one structured didactics, an extensive didactic lecture series, faculty and resident combined conferences, Medical Education Conference (Grand Rounds), specialty workshops, regularly scheduled Visiting Professors, and a prosthetic and orthotic conference. Lunch is provided for all noon conferences.

Didactic Lecture Series (DLS):
A well structured curriculum that includes extensive lectures on all aspects of PM&R. It consists of a series of 14 lecture modules that span over an 18 month time period. It occurs Monday to Weds. at noon. Therefore each lecture module is repeated twice for every resident. Two lecture modules repeat on a yearly basis (Anatomy and Introduction to PM&R). Each lecture module is individually developed by a faculty member and an assigned resident liaison. Lectures are primarily provided by full-time and part-time faculty as well as physicians from CMC and the community. An Anatomy module occurs yearly and has included a multiple methods of instruction: lectures, prosected cadaver, video/DVD, computer program.

Lecture Modules include:
* Anatomy (yearly)
* Introduction to PM&R series (yearly)
* Physiatric Therapeutics
* Joint and Connective Tissue
* Musculoskeletal
* Cancer/Pain
* Spinal Cord Injury
* Brain Injury
* Cerebrovascular Disease
* Administrative
* Prosthetics and Orthotics
* Pediatrics
* Electrodiagnosis
* Cardio/Pulmonary
* Complementary Medicine
* Nerve and Muscle

Resident/Faculty combined conference:
Every Thursday a resident led conference occurs at noon with an assigned faculty member as the advisor for that conference. Numerous formats are utilized and include didactics, case presentations, guest lecturers, and innovative computer applications (that in the past have include educational games in a Jeopardy format and The Price is Right). Several different conferences are rotated on these Thursdays:

* Case Conference
* Journal Club
* EMG Conference
* Ethics Conference,
* Mortality and Morbidity conference
* Competency Conference (based on one of the ACGME 6 competencies)
* Research Conference

Medical Education Conference:
Occurs Friday at noon approximately 3 times/month. Lectures are given by faculty (both local and visiting), residents (each resident provides two within their three years), and other guest speakers. These are typically focused areas of interest provided in a review of the literature format.

Specialty Workshops:
The are workshops that occur approximately 2 times per year. Topics in the past have included EMG Workshop (occurs approx. every other year), Manual Medicine, Complementary medicine, Peripheral Joint Injections, Acupuncture, Modality fair. A two day P&O course was recently held in Charlotte sponsored by our department and will be repeated on an every other year basis. In the past our residents have also utilized their educational stipend and allotted conference time to attend other P&O courses nationally.

Click here to see the RESEARCH PROGRAM

This article is reposted with thanks to Carolinas HealthCare System.