The Intern Year – How to function as a doctor

Training is divided over 13 distinct 4-week blocks, each with its own unique training purpose and goal.

6 months of year are spent on psychiatry rotations. These months are designed to provide interns the foundational knowledge of how to manage acute and seriously ill psychiatric patients. These rotations are divided across the program’s three flagship hospitals, with each site providing a unique experience and patient population.

  • Inpatient Psychiatry (20 weeks)
    • University Hospital (4 weeks): exposure to serious mental illness among vulnerable and underserved populations; includes exposure to psychiatry consults
    • Audie L Murphy (ALM) VA Hospital (8 weeks): manage serious mental illness, substance use disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder
    • Brooke Army Medical Center (8 weeks): learn about unique aspects of military psychiatry and get an introduction to psychotherapy training
  • Emergency Psychiatry (8 weeks)
    • ALM VA Hospital: emergency triage of acute psychiatric conditions and patients
    • 2-weeks of night-float in which interns learn how to safely care for patients in the emergency room and on the inpatient psychiatry unit overnight

6 months of the year are spent on “off-service” non-psychiatric training. On these rotations, psychiatry interns operate as integral members of other medical services.

  • Inpatient Medicine or Pediatrics (8 weeks)
    • University Hospital, ALM VA Hospital, and/or Brooke Army Medical Center
  • Inpatient/Consults Neurology (8 weeks)
    • University Hospital (1 month)
    • Brooke Army Medical Center (1 month)
  • Outpatient medicine (4 weeks)
    • Adult outpatient at ALM VA Hospital; includes palliative care exposure
    • Or Adolescent medicine at Brooke Army Medical Center
  • Emergency medicine (4 weeks)
    • University Hospital