The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires that all residents in General Preventive Medicine and Public Health (GPM/PH) have completed at least one year of clinical training before entering any GPM/PH program, and the Stony Brook program requires that this be in an ACGME-accredited clinical residency program. A transitional or internship year can fulfill this requirement. Though we cannot guarantee acceptance into another Stony Brook program, we may offer assistance to applicants to our program who are interested in securing a PGY1 position either here at University Hospital or at one of our affiliated sites. Upon satisfactory completion of that year of clinical training the candidate would enter our GPM/PH program.

I haven’t taken Step III of the USMLE. Am I eligible?

University Hospital minimum entrance requirements for residency training programs at our institution requires that residency candidates must have taken Step III of the USMLE by the end of their PGY1 year.

What if I have been out of training for a number of years? Am I still eligible for your program?

In the more than twenty years that we have been training public health and preventive medicine professionals we have welcomed into our program physicians who have had prior careers in education, the military, and private practice. The re-entry into graduate medical education was a logical outgrowth of new or longstanding areas of interest. If you feel your experiences and current interest in the field of preventive medicine fall outside the more common profiles of residency program candidates, please send an email to the Program Director or Program Coordinator, outlining your experience and current interest in the field, along with your CV. We will consider such inquiries on an individual basis.

The field of preventive medicine looks interesting to me, but I don’t know that much about it. What sorts of career opportunities would I have?

The current Commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Health Services (SCDHS) is a graduate of our program, as are the Medical Director for the Injury Prevention and Control Program of the Long Island Regional Poison Control Center, the Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs at the New York State Quality Improvement Organization (IPRO), and the SCDHS’s Medical Director for the Bureau of Epidemiology and Disease Control, Director of Public Health, and Medical Director for the Bureau of Preventive Services. All these agencies and organizations are practicum sites for our training program. Our graduates have gone on to careers in academia, clinical research, quality improvement, managed care, and to positions with such agencies as the FDA, CDC, NIH, and State and County Departments of Health. Others have pursued careers in occupational medicine based on experiences within our Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. For more information about careers in preventive medicine, please visit the field’s professional organizations: the American College of Preventive Medicine (ACPM), the Association for Teachers of Preventive Medicine (ATPM), and the American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM).