Connecticut has some of the best public school systems in the country, and there are also multiple local options for private education, including some of the oldest and most prestigious private schools.
Resident wellness is of paramount importance for our program and is approached in several ways. We have a Wellness Committee which regularly plans a variety of events for our residents. We also have a Wellness Room in our Resident Lounge to provide residents with a quiet, private place where they can rest, meditate, read, listen to music or chat with a colleague. Resident wellness is also a high priority for our institution, for our medical school, and for Hartford Healthcare. A variety of resources are available to all residents to support wellness.
A critical opportunity that our University-sponsored program offers involves working with our medical students. Medical students from Quinnipiac work with us during their third year clerkships, their fourth year sub-internships and various electives. We expect all of our residents to develop strong teaching skills to help provide the students with an inspiring experience that will create a lifelong impact on their careers. This experience not only benefits the students, but enhances the learning of our residents and provides them with teaching skills which they can bring to careers as clinician educators and to other teaching roles. Each year, one of our residents is selected by the medical students for a teaching award which we present at graduation, recognizing the resident for dedication to student education as well as serving as a role model for the students.
In addition to dedicated rotation responsibilities and experiences, which will include supervised clinical and therapeutic patient and family encounters, engagement with interdisciplinary treatment teams and interactions with other residents and learners, residents will have protected individualized supervision time, protected time for didactics, group supervision and scholarship.
We hope that our residents choose to stay and practice locally, but they are able to provide evidence-based, interdisciplinary psychiatric care and become competent and compassionate physician leaders in any practice setting they choose. If they choose to continue their training, they will be prepared for competitive fellowship opportunities.
During the first year, residents have the opportunity to work alongside internal medicine residents on their inpatient medicine and ICU rotations, providing a robust and collaborative inpatient medicine learning experience. In addition, year 1 residents rotate with residents in inpatient pediatrics.
In years 2 and 3, residents work alongside rural psychiatry residents in their behavioral health rotations and in their continuity clinic to model a collaborative approach to care for a rural patient population.
Weekend and day trips are easy to accomplish in New England. Bridgeport, CT and Wesport, CT are approximately 1.5 hours from New York City and 2.5 hours from Boston, MA. Torrington, CT is less than a three-hour drive from both destinations as well. Additionally, these areas are close to hiking and skiing in Connecticut, western Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Connecticut’s beaches, casinos, vineyards, breweries and museums are an even shorter drive away.