Research Electives

Available Electives

Research Elective

This rotation is a two-week elective to provide residents protected time for a formal scholarly project with a self-designated faculty research mentor. The goal of this rotation is for the resident physician to gain a greater understanding of the scientific method, analysis of current literature, and acquisition of new knowledge through a mentored research experience. Prior to the rotation, residents are required to complete a 1-2 page research elective form and receive approval from his/her faculty research mentor. The form must provide a detailed description of the scholarly project, its research plan and timeline, the specific tasks to be conducted and anticipated outcomes from the rotation. It is expected that most research projects will take place over the course of several months to two years, with protected research elective time allocated for periods of intensive work such as background literature reviews, data collection, or data analysis.  It is further expected that this scholarly project will culminate in a final product by the end of the residents’ residency training.  This may be an abstract, a poster presentation, the draft of a paper, or a publication.

VA Quality Improvement/Patient Safety Elective

This will be a two-week elective in which residents will commence a QI project from the start and continue to work on it after the elective is over. An AIM statement, and appropriate measures are expected to be done before the completion of this two weeks and this should commence an abstract to be submitted for presentation at a regional/national conference.  Residents will do patient safety consults at the VA in which they investigate incident reports by interviewing all parties involved and taking a multidisciplinary approach to finding if any system errors were involved with the incident.  They will write up their findings and present to CRQS and VA Patient safety coordinator when applicable. Residents may have the opportunity to take place in a few sessions of an RCA if applicable at VA or UF Health.  If no RCA then a didactic lecture with fishbone diagrams can be done in order to explain the intent of an RCA and how one is conducted. This will be at the discretion of the CRQS.  Residents will attend Patient safety meetings and peer review meeting at the VA and will attend the AHRQ meeting at UFHealth. Residents will audit H&Ps, progress notes, discharge summaries at the VA in an effort to continue to educate our residents on correct terminology and documentation in order to continue to increase our case severity index initiative through the VA. Residents may be called on to present during Patient Safety morning report the case that they investigated if it provides meaningful lessons for our housestaff.  Other QI tools are at discretion of CRQS for example but not limited to process mapping, xMR charting, and Lean teaching.  All morning reports and noon conferences are expected to be attended.