Your Training at Barre Family Health Center
The Barre Clinical Team...Meet Your Teachers!
As a resident in Barre, you will have the opportunity to work closely with our faculty of 11 family physicians, including an osteopathic physician who sees patients for OMM and teaches our Barre DO residents, and a sports medicine fellowship-trained physician who teaches our residents how to perform a multitude of ultrasound-guided injections. We also have two nurse practitioners and two physician assistants to help meet the patient care demands of our busy health center. Our behavioral health team includes two faculty-level clinical psychologists, a behavioral science fellow, and a licensed social worker. Medical, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, and psychology students add to this multidisciplinary integrated learning environment.
We also welcome on-site consultants who see our Barre patients right here at the health center, decreasing their travel burden. This also provides an excellent learning experience for our residents! Our consultants represent the fields of podiatry, cardiology, psychiatry, orthopedics, and plastic surgery.
Our friendly, experienced office staff and nurses are crucial members of our Barre team, who enjoy working with our residents.
Continuity and Community Oriented Care Across a Lifetime
Recognizing that many of our graduates will go on to practice in small towns and community hospitals, the Barre curriculum has a focus on preparing you to be a leader in an independent community practice anywhere in the world. Maternal-child health, preventive health for children and adults, urgent and emergent child and adult care, geriatric care, and dignified end-of-life care are all important aspects of our curriculum. As a Barre resident, you will care for your own panel of patients. You will become skilled in the management of acute and chronic medical illness in a variety of settings, including the health center, the hospital, Holden Nursing Home, local schools, and even in patients’ homes, as house calls are routine.
Family-Centered Maternity Care
Barre prides itself on a continuity maternity care experience for both our patients and our residents. Residents are paired with all prenatal patients and deliver their patients at the Memorial Campus with close faculty support. Your involvement in this major life event forges a relationship and bond with families in a way that few other experiences can. Residents have the opportunity to confirm patient pregnancy, perform a dating ultrasound under the guidance of one of our trained faculty, see the patient for their prenatal visits, manage their labor, perform the delivery, and round on mom and baby postpartum.
Urgent and Inpatient Care
Our curriculum includes training in trauma evaluation and management, stabilization of acutely ill patients, and a concentrated experience in managing hospitalized patients from our practice. During your health center chief rotation, you will become proficient at managing hospitalized patients from the community, not just immediately at the bedside.
Addiction Medicine
Like many communities, ours has been hard hit by the opioid epidemic. As a result, we have a robust office-based addiction treatment program staffed by a dedicated team of nurses and a medical office assistant. This team provides a first point of contact for our more than 250 patients on Suboxone and Sublocade. All of our faculty are trained as prescribers and mentor our residents as they learn how to care for this population.
Quality Improvement
Ongoing Quality Improvement initiatives are essential to providing the best possible care for our patients and the best possible education for our residents. Recent work has focused on our response to the COVID-19 pandemic – bringing rapid PCR testing to Barre, keeping children up-to-date on immunizations with dedicated well-child clinics, and integrating telehealth best practices into our care model. Our health center is an NCQA level 3 (highest possible) Patient Centered Medical Home.
The Barre Experience: Hands-On Family Medicine
In Barre, we have long enjoyed our reputation for excellence in procedure-oriented medicine as well as urgent and emergent care. We perform a tremendous number of minor surgical procedures: various skin lesion excisions, cryotherapy, vasectomies and I&D’s. Residents are trained in joint injections, and women’s health procedures such as colposcopy, endometrial biopsies, and IUD insertions.
Residents become adept at more urgent and emergent procedures as well. All Barre residents gain experience with casting and management of fractures and sprains, suturing complex lacerations, removing foreign bodies, starting IVs and administering parenteral medications. Maternity patients are often triaged at the health center. Critically ill patients can be stabilized in Barre and then transported for admission to the hospital. On-site urgent care is provided after hours providing an unsurpassed on-call experience.