Rural Residency Training
Our residency program is very excited to be launching a Rural Training track in 2026!
Funded by a 5-year grant from the federal government Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA), we will begin recruitment for our first rural residents in July 2025, with interviews in the Fall of 2025 and Match Day for our first rural residents in March 2026. Research has convincingly shown that family physicians training in a rural setting are 2-3 times more likely to practice in a rural setting after residency than family medicine residency graduates are in general. Our hope is to help meet the critical needs of rural communities both in our own western New York area and across the country.
The rural track family medicine residents will have continuity practices at Tri-County Family Medicine, an FQHC-lookalike clinic system with 6 clinic sites that has served the rural counties south of the city of Rochester for over 50 years. One of the founding members of Tri-County Family Medicine was Paul Frame, MD. Dr. Frame practiced rurally here for 35 years before retiring in 2009 from clinical practice. He had a career-long interest in evidence-based preventive medicine and the implementation of preventive services in practice. He published one of the first evidence-based critical reviews of clinical preventive services in 1975. He was a member of the United States Preventive Services Task Force from 1992-2004 and a member of the Institute of Medicine since 1988.
Residents will do rotations in rural hospitals that are part of the University of Rochester Medical Center system, including Noyes Hospital in Dansville, St. James Hospital in Hornell, and Jones Memorial Hospital in Wellsville. This will include both inpatient work at these hospitals and outpatient rotations in hospital-affiliated specialty practices. The hospitals and practices serve the citizens of Allegany, Livingston, and Steuben counties south of Rochester.
Robust obstetrics training will be an essential component of this program. Rural communities frequently struggle to provide proximate access to maternity care. Data on “maternity care deserts” from the March of Dimes shows that US women travel almost 10 miles on average to their nearest birthing hospital. While the average in New York state is lower than this, the average distance traveled to the nearest birthing hospital in our rural counties is 1.5 to 3 times higher than this. The residency and the family physicians with advanced obstetrics training that we are recruiting will both help to close these gaps for birthing persons in rural New York.
There is a lot of exciting work being done and updates will be posted to this website as they occur.