Work

Hospital at Home – an emerging opportunity for internal medicine trainees

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: • Hospital at home offers an innovative and unique training environment for learning generalist skills. • Internal medicine curriculum competencies can be obtained through rotation to hospital at home as part of a balanced training programme. • Hospital at home offers improved exposure to older adults and geriatric syndromes, immersion in community healthcare, advance care planning and end of life care, risk management and shared decision making, leadership and teamworking skills. • With an increasing focus on community healthcare, internal medicine training programmes should routinely include hospital at home. Hospital at Home (HAH) is growing at pace in the UK and is an acute clinical service that takes staff, equipment, technologies, medication and skills usually provided in hospitals and delivers that hospital care to selected people in their homes or in nursing homes. Services are as yet mostly excluded from doctors’ core training rotations. In parallel, non-traditional training pathways are being created to allow doctors to meet competencies outside of higher specialty training programmes. Evaluation of working in HAH as part of a locally designed internal medicine equivalence programme was undertaken, with specific focus on whether internal medicine curriculum competencies could be obtained. HAH provides valid internal medicine training, offering unique opportunities in clinical decision making, risk management, multidisciplinary team working, palliative medicine, and core internal and geriatric medicine. Reduced exposure to specific procedural skills and resuscitation in HAH can be mitigated across a balanced training programme. As HAH services develop, inclusion of HAH within internal medicine training programmes is recommended, alongside further research into their potential as a training environment.

Source: Future Healthcare Journal

DOI: 10.1016/j.fhj.2024.100198

Authors: Stephanie Moore, Rebekah Schiff, Daniel S. Furmedge

Institutions: St Thomas' Hospital, King's College London

Language: English

Topic: Innovations in Medical Education

Subfield: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,000