The UW Alaska IM Rural Residency is the nation’s first ACGME-designated rural track program in IM. Accredited in January 2023, it offers the best of both worlds by combining the educational expertise of a well-established urban academic program with a novel primary care training experience in rural Alaska.

The program follows the 1-2 model common among rural training programs in family medicine. The first year is spent integrated with the UW IM residency program in Seattle, WA. Our residents (2-2-2) are embedded in the primary care cohort for their intern year, receiving excellent training in the core clinical skills for primary care, inpatient medicine, intensive care, subspecialty medicine, and geriatrics.

Our residents then move to the rural community of Soldotna, AK for their second and third years. In Soldotna, residents have an intensive longitudinal outpatient experience, including four half-days per week of continuity clinic providing primary care and internal medicine consultation to a panel of medically complex patients. They spend additional months in Alaska doing core and elective rotations at other rural and urban sites throughout the state, allowing them to get broad-spectrum general internal medicine training, as well as exposure to diverse clinical opportunities available for future practice.

In contrast to more traditional IM programs, this program is particularly focused on training residents to be strong rural primary care internists, with a honed skill set that allows them to care for highly comorbid/complex patients in communities with fewer health care resources than are available in metropolitan areas.

Discover the heart of our program in this brief VIDEO that offers an inside look at what it is like to live and practice general internal medicine in rural Alaska. 

Accepts IMG: We welcome International Medical Graduates (IMGs) to apply; however, we are unable to sponsor J-1 visa applications at this time.