HealthPartners Western Wisconsin Rural Family Medicine Residency Program is a three-year residency on the 1-2 model, where the first year is spent in a traditional high-acuity urban hospital and the second and third years are embedded in well-established rural clinics with critical-access hospitals.
Year one is at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, MN, alongside the other G1 residents at the UMN-Methodist Hospital Family Medicine Residency. This longstanding and highly competitive program provides a rigorous first year experience. Residents manage house call for the hospital and gain expertise in management of patients in the emergency department, intensive care units, labor and delivery and the general hospital floors. Children’s Hospital of MN provides a one month experience in inpatient pediatrics.
Years two and three, residents move to western Wisconsin. Each resident will have a two-year continuity clinic at either Amery Hospital & Clinic or Westfields Hospital & Clinic in New Richmond. The rotation curriculum is identical for all residents and includes inpatient experiences and specialty care at both hospitals. Each of the hospitals is a designated 25-bed critical access hospital, improving access to healthcare by keeping essential services in rural communities.
Residents will treat patients in the emergency departments and inpatient and outpatient settings. They will provide longitudinal maternity care for their own patients, and will assist in deliveries for other physicians. In addition to full-spectrum family medicine training, residents will learn principles of geriatric psychiatry in the dedicated inpatient facility, and will participate in the wound management specialty clinic. Specialty care will be taught in longitudinal experiences, working in the office with visiting consultants across the range of medical and surgical subspecialists. The curriculum also includes rural health policy and practice management.
The residency is accredited through the HealthPartners Institute. Development of the residency is supported by a grant from the Wisconsin Rural Physician Residency Assistance Program.
HealthPartners is an award-winning integrated health care system based in Bloomington, Minn., with a team of 22,500 people dedicated to a mission to improve the health of members, patients and the community. Methodist Hospital, Amery Hospital & Clinic, and Westfields Hospital & Clinic are all part of the HealthPartners care system.
