Many students and residents aspiring to become direct primary care doctors have reached out and asked for advice on how to write a direct primary care elective rotation curriculum. Writing your own elective rotation curriculum for a month with a direct primary care doctor can be transformational, and it’s a crucial step towards seeing what works in the direct primary care model. I highly encourage all students and residents to look into either writing their own direct primary care elective rotation curriculum or using a template to write their own curriculum.
When I was a third year resident, I wrote my own direct primary care elective rotation curriculum and it was quickly approved by my program director. I traveled out to Kansas and Colorado to shadow some influential direct primary care doctors and it was transformative for my journey to start and grow my own direct primary care practice. I detail that journey in my book, Startup DPC How to Start and Grow Your Direct Primary Care Practice.
Writing a Direct Primary Care Elective Rotation Curriculum: What to Include
When you write a direct primary care elective rotation curriculum, you should include required responsibilities for the elective rotation, like the amount of time you’ll spend shadowing, working with, or learning from a direct primary care doctor.
You should also include goals of the rotation, like being able to differentiate between various payment models for family medicine and to gain experiential knowledge from other practicing physicians in varying payment models.
Further you should include learning objectives, like understanding the concepts of how to write a business plan and learning how to interact with the community as a business owner. There are so many tangible skills to learn, and this is a good place to include those objectives.
Download our Direct Primary Care Elective Rotation Curriculum
If you’d like to download our direct primary care elective rotation curriculum, it can be found as a part of our Startup DPC course on writing a business plan. In my opinion, these two documents go hand in hand.