This is the first entry in the Rural Training Track Blog, and truth be told, my first attempt at blogging anything. I must confess, I do not understand much of the blog-o-sphere other than that there are mommy bloggers that get routinely shamed and somehow this becomes news on MSN.
We have a Rural Training Track at St Luke's Miner's Campus as of July 1, 2018. We are a 1+2 program, where the majority of the PGY-1 year is spent at the "urban site," in our case St Luke's Warren Campus and the majority of the PGY-2 and PGY-3 years are spent at the "rural site." To our knowledge, we are the only RTT program in Pennsylvania. We are also the first residency program at our hospital and in Schuylkill County, PA. At this time last year, we were putting together our program application. We had an ACGME site visit and were approved. We recruited two high quality candidates after the Match and had them licensed in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey for a July 1 start date.
We had our first residents rounding on patients in our rural hospital in 2018. We also saw our first residents establish continuity patients in our Rural Health Centers. Our residents were the first Family Medicine Residents to deliver babies at our Allentown Campus.
Administration came through in a big way for our program. We have a beautiful conference room with really impressive video equipment. We have a great library with a bunch of new books and joint models and journals.
The rural faculty (all one of us right now) hit the ground running as well. I joined the Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians Resident and Student Affairs Committee and presented a couple topics at the Family Medicine Education Consortium this Fall. I completed the STFM Faculty Fundamentals course and the residents and I wrote a topic, Metabolic Syndrome, for Essential Evidence Plus.
2018 was a busy year. I'm hoping for big things from our little program. I will keep you posted.
Thanks for reading.
Greg