Lectures / Conferences
Upstate Medical University actively engages in organizing and hosting a variety of lectures designed to deepen the medical knowledge of its residents and interns. These educational sessions, which form the core of the University's residency program, provide an opportunity for participants to delve into various medical specialties and foster their analytical abilities.
Core Curriculum Lecture Series
Central to the educational experience at SUNY Upstate in Syracuse is the Core Curriculum Lecture Series, which runs nearly every day of the week from 7:00-8:00 am. The structure of this lecture series includes a series of subspecialty-specific medical emergencies (during the summer), followed by subspecialty-focused blocks of lectures throughout the remainder of the year.
There are also occasional non-clinical lectures, including topics like contract negotiations and financial wellness, throughout the year to provide education beyond the wards. Additionally, there are Senior, and Junior Resident-led conferences (i.e., Journal Club, EBM Lectures, PICO, Intern Conferences, Intern Journal Club, etc.) on Monday mornings, and Quality Conferences along with our Senior Thesis lectures, all discussed further below.
Lastly, the Program Directors Conference and the Monthly Housestaff Business Meeting will occur during this time. As we understand that not all housestaff can attend every conference, lectures are videotaped and uploaded onto Blackboard for review at any time.
The third-year residents are required to present a topic to interested faculty and their peers during their third academic year. These topics are selected by the Resident and require the approval of the Educational Programs Office. The Chief Residents assist with the selection of an appropriate topic and audio-visual needs. These will be presented during the first and third Thursdays.
All senior residents participate in a bi-weekly seminar in which they critically review important journal articles as well as learn biostatistics. These sessions are divided into individual journal articles, critical appraisals, PICOs, and Evidence-Based Topic Debates.
The PGY-1s on teams participate in a twice-weekly intern-only didactic session from 2-2:30PM that is specifically geared to their level of training. These sessions involve topic-focused interactive lectures by faculty, clinical staff, and chief residents.
Noon Report runs every weekday from 12:00-1:00 pm, both at UH and the VA. The senior residents on inpatient teams attend these sessions and present cases supervised by a chief resident and a faculty member. Apart from a case discussion, board questions are also reviewed daily. At the VA, one session per week is dedicated to procedural and/or medical emergency simulation training. Every other Friday is a quality improvement lecture provided by our VA Chief Resident of Quality and Safety. Once per month at UH, there is a joint EM-IM report in which ED residents and faculty also present cases.
Every Thursday afternoon, from 12:00PM - 1:00PM, the members of The Department of Medicine (faculty, housestaff, and students) come together at Power Rounds, in which specialty-specific topics, cutting-edge research, and clinicopathologic conferences (CPCs) will be presented. Members of the Upstate faculty, as well as invited speakers from around the country, are invited to speak. Upstate Medical University designates this continuing medical education activity for 1 credit hour in Category 1 of the Physician's Recognition Award of the American Medical Association.
The interns present a clinically relevant topic once a year in the noon conference. This gives them an opportunity to enhance their skills in gathering evidence and critically analyzing it. It also helps them familiarize themselves to a certain extent with the format of chairman rounds.
On the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, two residents combine to present a case that is a "near-miss", or in which an adverse event happened/could have happened, and lead a discussion involving root cause analysis and steps to prevent similar morbidity/mortality in the future.
These are held from 3:45-4:45 pm and are open to all residents and fellows. Topics include medical ethics, palliative care, medical decision-making, residents as teachers, bioinformatics, research design, biostatistics, critical literature analysis and medico-legal matters.
Each division within the Department of Medicine has weekly conferences and meetings that are open to all members of the Department and Upstate community. Please see each division’s websites for further information.
