Residency | Department of Medicine | School of Medicine

The Queen's University Adult Infectious Diseases training program is pleased to participate in the 2023 medicine subspecialty match for the first time. We are an accredited new program with full accreditation pending external review. This external review will take place at a future date following enrollment of our first resident.

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Program Highlights

The Infectious Diseases division at Queen's University is led by a growing group of faculty with a dedication to patient care, education and research. We are excited for residents to join our highly collegial training environment. There are currently five full time faculty members in the division with 3 cross appointed faculty (pediatrics, public health) and two clinical microbiologists.

We provide acute inpatient consultation to all adult patients admitted to the Kingston General Hospital site. Our clinical service is busy - we routinely see over 1100 consults a year, representing a diverse spectrum of infectious diseases presentations and patient populations. We are a regional resource for Infectious Diseases with remote expertise and support for the many community hospitals in our region and for the northern Ontario communities of Weeneebayko along the James Bay and Hudson Bay coasts.

The Infectious Diseases division is the main provider of ambulatory infectious diseases consultation and HIV care and expertise for the region through the Infection and Immunology Clinic at the Hotel Dieu Hospital site of KHSC. We have an active cohort of 225 HIV patients, as well as an expanding cohort of PrEP patients. Our division is actively engaged in efforts to expand access to PrEP in semi-urban and rural areas.

In collaboration with KFL&A Public Health, we also provide tuberculosis assessment and management through a twice weekly ambulatory clinic. We also partner with KFL&A Public Health through the Sexual Health Clinic and Gay Men's Health / PrEP Clinic.

Faculty members provide leadership in Infection Prevention and Control and Antimicrobial Stewardship both at KHSC and regionally at many of our community hospital partners.

Admission

Admission to the Infectious Diseases program at Queen's University is through the Medicine Subspecialty Match, coordinated by the Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS).

Curriculum and Educational Activities

Our training program meets the Royal College Subspecialty training requirements for Adult Infectious Diseases (2016 revision). Mandatory rotations occur across the different stages of training using the CBME framework.

Transition to Discipline - inpatient consults

Foundations of Discipline - inpatient consults (2), infection control and prevention, medical microbiology (2), research

Core of Discipline - inpatient consults (3), antimicrobial stewardship, public health, medical microbiology, pediatric infectious diseases (2), elective/selective (3), research (2)

Transition to Practice - inpatient consults (junior attending) (2), elective/selective (2)

The program will use the principle of graded responsibility based on the resident’s attainment of competence in Entrustable Professional Activities as one progresses throughout the stages of the competence by design framework.

One of the benefits of CBME is that rotation schedules can be modified to allow residents to complete more rotations in their area of interest to prepare for further fellowship training, community practice, etc. Examples of tailored experiences included elective rotations in tropical / travel medicine, transplant infectious diseases, dermatology, viral hepatitis and community infectious diseases.

Residents will complete two rotations in pediatric infectious diseases. One rotation will be held at KHSC under the supervision of Dr. Kirk Leifso, our pediatric infectious diseases colleague. The second rotation is held at CHEO through an inter-institutional affiliation of the University of Ottawa.

During the course of the training program, residents will attend one half day ambulatory clinic per week unless away from Kingston. This will include a longitudinal resident clinic alternating weekly with either general infectious diseases clinic, TB clinic or HIV/PrEP clinic. Additional clinic experience is provided in pediatric infectious diseases at the Children's Outpatient Centre at Hotel Dieu Hospital during the pediatric infectious diseases rotation while clinics in STI and PrEP will be mandatory during the Public Health rotation at KFL&A Public Health.

Selective rotations in dermatology, rheumatology, allergy and immunology and viral hepatitis are available at Queen's. Future planned selectives include community infectious diseases through Queen's at Lakeridge Health (Oshawa) and Northern/Remote experience in partnership with Weeneebayko Health Authority.

Residents attend a weekly academic half day, protected from clinical responsibilities, with an evolving curriculum content to cover the breadth of infectious diseases and microbiology content outlined in the Royal College Objectives of Training along with related CanMEDS competencies and topics on professional development and transition to practice.

Infectious diseases case rounds are held weekly and attended by residents and learners, divisional faculty and microbiology staff. These rounds are case-based teaching around patients encountered on the consult service or in clinics. Weekly plate rounds are held by the microbiologist on call and present short teaching sessions related to laboratory diagnostics. A monthly journal club occurs with presentation by residents and faculty in an informal setting to encourage discussion and debate.

The Infectious Diseases division participates within the Department of Medicine through weekly Mortality and Morbidity rounds and Medicine Grand Rounds.

The program will support resident attendance at national and international infectious diseases meetings such as AMMI-CACMID and IDWeek.

Research

Residents will be encouraged to identify and meet with a research supervisor early on in their training to develop a research question and project that will lead to presentation at suitable conferences or publication Dr. Santiago Perez is the designated faculty member to support and mentor residents in research activities. Residents may take up to 5 elective blocks to support approved activities in research, quality improvement, educational scholarship, or creative professional activity.

Active areas of research in the division include clinical trials of COVID-19 therapeutics, aging in HIV patients, Staph. aureus infections, tick-borne infectious diseases, Clostridioides difficile, antimicrobial resistance and development of microbe based therapeutics and expanding access to PrEP in rural settings.

The division of Infectious Diseases is part of the Translational Institute of Medicine at Queen's University Department of Medicine. This is a network to facilitate research collaboration between basic science researchers and clinicians and between different disciplines where common research interests exist. The TIME network will provide additional opportunities for ID residents to engage in scholarly activity. Research facilities including the Gastrointestinal Disease Research Unit and laboratories in the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at Queens University will provide opportunities for fellows to pursue research activities.

Training Sites

Kingston General Hospital (KGH) is a 440 bed tertiary care hospital and is the main site for inpatient care through six general internal medicine clinical teaching units and admitting subspecialty services including cardiology, respirology, nephrology, neurology and gastroenterology. Critical care is provided through two mixed medical-surgical ICUs with fifty two beds combined. KGH provides surgical care through multiple disciplines including cardiac, thoracics, urology, orthopedics, plastics, vascular, gynecology and neurosurgery. KGH is home to the Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario which provides oncology care for our catchment region through both ambulatory and inpatient care. This includes an autologous stem cell transplant program and inpatient management of post-allogeneic stem cell transplants. KHSC hosts a living donor and cadaveric renal transplant program and provides inpatient care for solid organ recipients that have received transplantation at other centres.

KGH is the primary training site for inpatient infectious diseases consultation rotations throughout the course of the program. KGH is also the site for rotations in medical microbiology, infection control and prevention and antimicrobial stewardship.

Hotel Dieu Hospital (HDH) is the main ambulatory care site for Kingston Health Sciences Centre hosting medicine and surgical clinics along with an urgent care clinic. Ambulatory infectious diseases clinics including general infectious diseases clinic, tuberculosis clinic and HIV/PrEP clinic are held at this site. Outpatient pediatric infectious diseases clinics are also located at HDH in the Children's Outpatient Clinic. Most ambulatory care experience, including the resident longitudinal clinic will occur at the HDH site.

Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Public Health (KFL&A) is the site for rotations in Public Health along with additional ambulatory care experiences through the KFL&A Public Health Sexual Health Clinic and KFL&A PrEP and Gay Men's Sexual Health Clinic

CHEO is the site for one of the two pediatric infectious diseases rotations and provides residents with the full range of pediatric infectious disease experience to complement the pediatric infectious diseases rotation at KHSC

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