Roseburg Family Medicine Ready to Launch
Published in the June 5 Edition of The News-Review
The Roseburg Family Medicine Residency has its first eight physician interns start their orientation process in three weeks; the residency starts orientation June 15, with academics starting the June 29. The number of physicians training in the program will increase by eight per year, totaling 24 when the program is at full speed. This substantial increase in primary care capacity couldn’t have come at a better time for our community.
The level and scope of effort required to support our citizens in the county if we have a full-blown outbreak of COVID-19 is significant. The work already accomplished in preparation of a major spike or surge in COVID-19 patients came at the expense of many long hours by a dedicated team of clinicians, planners, logisticians and local leadership. Several of us serving on the Douglas County COVID-19 Response Team wondered how different things would have been if we could have counted on eight more physicians to assist the community, let alone 24 if the program had begun three years ago.
So, here we are on the cusp of integrating these young doctors into our lives in Douglas County. While the program is hosted by CHI Mercy Medical Center and Aviva Health, the reality is these providers are a true community asset. The program is designed from the ground up to train family medicine physicians to practice in a rural (but not frontier) setting. Even the resident selection process weighed heavily how oriented the candidates were on rural America, how patient-centered they were, and their drive to make a difference in their communities when they ultimately land where they will practice.
The curriculum has built into it tracks that focus on community engagement, lifestyle medicine, working with nonprofit agencies on quality improvement projects, and even practice management in a rural setting, all of this in addition to their standard clinical rotations. The goal is a well-rounded health care leader who can “plug and play” in a rural setting. We are very optimistic our area will retain some of these providers when they finish their training and certification process, as studies have shown this to be the case.
To facilitate the training of these providers, Aviva Health is embarking on a large construction project to more than double the clinical space at our Roseburg clinic located on the Jerry Bruce Community Campus, just north of Costco. To accommodate the creation of “pods” to implement Patient-Centered Primary Care Home operations, this state-of-the-art expansion will add over 30 more patient exam rooms, four more procedure rooms, and two negative pressure isolation rooms suitable for the safe diagnosis and treatment of low acuity COVID-19 patients. This clinic space is intended to also accommodate the integration of additional learners besides the residents, including clinical rotations of the Southern Oregon Medical Workforce Center once it’s up and running.
The leadership and staff at Mercy and Aviva Health are super excited about how our residency program will help improve patient access, inject energy into our community via these eight doctors and their families, and let us grow a future generation of family medicine providers who will put rural America first. If you’d like to know more about the residency please check out the residency website.
KC Bolton retired as a U.S. Army colonel and now serves as chief executive officer of Aviva Health.
