Welcome from the Internal Medicine Residency Program Director

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Welcome from Russell Moore, MD, Program Director

Welcome to the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, New York, where we dedicate ourselves to producing the next generation of physicians with an emphasis on patient care, critical thinking, and curiosity while also ensuring that the residents maintain a reasonable work-life balance.

Bassett has a long and storied history of training internal medicine residents with medical education having been a pillar of Bassett’s focus since the 1920s—and education continues to be a primary objective of the current administration. Whether you hope to find a career in primary care, as a hospitalist, or in a subspecialty, we are poised to provide training that will help you to meet your goals.

The Bassett Healthcare Network patient catchment area is huge, about the size of the state of Connecticut. Our residents see a wide variety of diagnoses and clinical scenarios. Additionally, due to the rural nature of our program we encounter a great deal of advanced pathology that is not often experienced in other settings. Our faculty are all full time Bassett-employed providers whose primary goal is to ensure our residents get the oversight they need to take care of our patients. We strongly encourage our attending physicians to engage in faculty development, which we offer twice a year. This allows them to stay up on their clinical teaching skills. Whether primary care, hospital medicine, critical care, or cardiology, our attending physicians are committed to the educational goals of our residents.

We regularly update our curriculum to ensure that our residents learn the skills that will help them to stand out as candidates for any job. Our Point of Care Ultrasound curriculum starts as a PGY1 but really gains momentum during the second year. During dedicated time on inpatient rotations our POCUS director works with the residents to identify patients that would benefit from an urgent study and then goes to the bedside with them to perform it. We are expanding this further with additional time in the simulation lab where software can be used to mimic what it is like to perform ultrasound exams on real patients. We also believe that being a great physician is more than just knowing medicine. We designed our Humanities curriculum to better connect us to patients and ourselves through the Arts. Each year, we develop a new way to use music, literature, or the visual arts to explore our own experiences in medicine.

At Bassett Medical Center we commit strongly to diversity and equity. As the first woman to hold the title of Chief of Medical Staff in the United States, Dr. Mary Imogene Bassett overcame significant adversity; we celebrate her accomplishments by naming our hospital system in dedication to her. Our institution takes pride in having a diverse group of physicians care for the members of our community. We in the residency program, share the same vision. We currently have trainees from more than 10 countries and hope to continue to have the same level of diversity moving forward.

Our medical center is located in a picturesque lakeside village nestled in rural Central New York. The beauty of Cooperstown and Otsego Lake is unmatched and allows for all sorts of watersports including kayaking and boating. Our community is small but manages to maintain two museums, the Baseball Hall of fame and a nationally renowned Opera. While we are not right near any particular large city, New York, Boston, Buffalo, Philadelphia and even Quebec and Toronto are just 4-6 hours away. This allows for a lot of weekend trips to explore all that the Northeast has to offer. Additionally, we are located midway between the Catskill and Adirondack mountain ranges so a short car ride results in the opportunity for world class skiing and hiking.

I hope that this overview provides a clearer picture about what Bassett Medical Center and Cooperstown have to offer. Please feel free to contact me directly with questions about our program and our community. Both are hidden gems. Each of us in the residency office look forward to getting to you know as applicants, and eventually as residents.

Thank you for your interest and, again, welcome to Bassett!