What is the difference between a family medicine residency and combined residencies in internal medicine and pediatrics, family medicine and psychiatry, and family medicine and internal medicine?
Dual certification programs offer graduates the opportunity to become Board-certified in each of two specialties. There are a handful of family medicine dual programs with internal medicine as well as with psychiatry. About 100 programs combine family medicine and pediatrics. In all cases, the focus tends to be more on the inpatient, technical side of each specialty, perhaps at the expense of longitudinal patient care experiences. Combined medicine and pediatrics programs lack the emphasis on women’s health that many practitioners desire, and they may focus more on NICU training than what the community-based physician caring for infants and children will encounter. In the real world, there is little difference in privileges sought and obtained by singly versus dually Boarded family physicians, and the dually Boarded physician may have more difficulty finding appropriate coverage (usually needs two different physicians) when taking time off.