Adverse effects of faculty practice on diagnostic content of residents' outpatient experience.

The outpatient experience of two cohorts of family medicine residents was compared. Those who worked at a site with an existing faculty practice had fewer pregnancy-related patient encounters and proportionately more encounters for acute self-limited care compared with residents at a site without a faculty practice (P less than .001). More important, the faculty-associated residents also cared for fewer patients with a variety of chronic diseases and saw them less frequently. These findings suggest that a coexistent faculty practice may have adverse effects on outpatient training in primary care.