Dear Family Medicine Residency Applicants,
Welcome to the Boston Medical Center Department of Family Medicine! From the day we welcomed our first group of Family Medicine residents in the summer of 1998, the BMC Family Medicine Residency Program has focused on providing its’ physicians-in-training with the skills and expertise needed to become clinician-leaders with an emphasis on urban underserved care in community health centers.
Over the last twenty-five years, our program has grown to 12 residents per year and includes our joint Family Medicine/Psychiatry residency for a total of 14 per class. Our committment is to serve the multi-lingual and multi-ethnic community health centers around the city of Boston, including Codman Square Health Center, South Boston Community Health Center, NeighborHealth (formerly East Boston Neighborhood Health Center) and Greater Roslindale Medical and Dental Center.
We are actively creating and maintaining a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for our residents. One initiative has been the re-organization of our residency admissions process to reduce bias and move us towards the goal of recruiting trainees who more accurately reflect the diversity of the population BMC serves and the future family doctors who will lead our discipline. We are aware that there is plenty more hard work needed to reach our vision and as an academic department we are committed to recruiting a diverse faculty to support resident mentorship and community.
Our residents train in a rigorous, urban academic program in an environment that values community health, health equity, and social justice. In their three years at BMC, residents receive advanced training in community-based care, hospital medicine, high quality and collaborative maternal and infant care, research, population health, family planning, anti-racism training, LGBQTI+ care, wellness and resiliency, and access to some of the finest experiences in areas such as global health, addiction medicine, integrative medicine, termination training and sports medicine. Each of these strong program elements has allowed our residency to develop a strong national reputation with particular note taken of our family medicine hospitalist training.
Perhaps the most important marker of the impact of our program on health care in the city of Boston and beyond can be seen by looking at what our graduates are doing and where. The majority of our graduates go on to practice in community health centers (most of which are Federally Qualified Health Centers) and remain in urban underserved settings. Additionally, most continue as teachers of residents or medical students. About one-quarter of recent graduates enter competitive fellowships including Sports Medicine, Addiction Medicine, Maternal Child Health, and Preventive Medicine. These fellows come back to serve in their communities, many of them returning to work at Boston Medical Center or in greater Boston. Our graduates are leaders in their communities, activists, and voices for change.
This is an important time to be entering Family Medicine and we are proud to be training the next generation of clinician leaders and researchers and fulfilling our mission to meet the health care needs of the people of the City of Boston and beyond.
I am looking forward to meeting you and learning more about YOUR vision for our future,
Suki Tepperberg MD MPH (she/her)
Clinical Associate Professor of Family Medicine
Program Director Family Medicine Residency
Boston Medical Center
Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, Boston University