COMMUNITY MEDICINE

At Downstate, we believe one of our strengths is our community. Central Brooklyn is a place where people from many different countries come together and live side by side and we are privileged to care for them in our offices. Over the past 20++ years. the dominant immigration patterns have been from the Caribbean, with representation from numerous island nations including Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Grenada to name just a few. We also have Spanish speaking patients from Central America, Panama  and Puerto Rico. Some patients come to us from the Middle East and Asia and bring with them their own cultures and languages.

We believe that learning about the community we work in is the best way to provide optimal care to our patients. And, we start on this path in the very first month of residency. Our interns spend the month of July working together to do a structured community needs assessment, go on community trips and have the opportunity to learn how to communicate with patients from different cultures. Our Orientation month is focused on helping them learn about the community while acquiring the basics skills they need to work in our diverse settings.

Our PGY2s come together again in January to continue their learning about Community Medicine when they have a chance to work together on a group project looking at our population. In 2020, we  mapped out our smokers – where they live, what ages, genders and nationalities they are – in order to design targeted interventions for them. A popular part of the PGY2 year is the creation of patient education videos in our on-campus recording studio. 

Finally, in the Third Year, our PGY3s come back together again in April to put a punctuation mark on their experience with us. They have a chance to look back on their experiences working here in Brooklyn and with their continuity patients. They return to the skills they learned in their first month of Community Medicine and create a needs assessment of the communities they will be working in next. They learn to say goodbye to their patients and ensure that they are carefully handed off to their colleagues, continuing the long history of our residency. Along the way they revisit community sites they learned about three years earlier.

We are very proud of our longitudinal community medicine rotation because we feel it prepares our residents to work in any community they choose. Brooklyn is truly an international center and if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!