Letter
from the Residency Director
Greetings
from the Chief Residents
The
Family Medicine Residency at St. John's was founded in 1973.
We offer a three-year, university affiliated family medicine
residency sponsored by a large, active community teaching
hospital. Six residents enter the program each year. The
faculty consists of eight family physicians, a psychologist,
and two
clinical pharmacists. The faculty and residents practice
in a new Family Medicine Center, a state-of-the-art facility
constructed in 2004 and located five to 10 minutes from the
Medical Center. This enhances the residents' learning experience
by ensuring ready availability of faculty at all times, and
by the modeling which occurs by having residents and faculty
seeing patients side-by-side in the same office suite.
Subspecialty consultation can be obtained quickly, and state-of-the-art
care is available in a variety of intensive care units and
a large set of surgical suites. While the residency program
is structured to provide optimal education, part of that education
is training to help the residents structure their time so
that their families are not ignored during their training
time or in their future practices.
The
first priority of this program is the optimal education of
Family Medicine residents by both faculty within the department
and specialists in a wide variety of disciplines. Over the
course of three years, this education moves more from the
inpatient to the outpatient setting, progressively modeling
the role of a practicing family physician.
Education is also provided in a variety of inpatient and
outpatient settings as described in the curriculum
section.
Introductory Letter from the Residency
Director
Thank you for your interest in Mercy Family Medicine Residency.
Since assuming the role of program director in 1999, I have
enjoyed seeing our program continue to role model excellence
in teaching, curriculum, and office practice. In the past
year we have been fortunate to move into a brand new, state-of-the-art
Family Medicine Center with a completely wireless EMR.
Family physicians are being asked to lead America into a
healthier 21st century, and I am excited about training physicians
to meet that challenge.
As you review our program and compare it to others, ask the
following six questions:
Is this a program that offers a variety of learning
experiences in family medicine?
Do the faculty have a commitment to
teaching?
Does the hospital have "state
of the art" facilities?
Does the support team including office staff, hospital personnel,
and medical staff promote a high level of patient and physician
satisfaction?
Do you feel that the area is an exciting place to live and
work?
Does the program have a philosophy
of compassion and commitment to both its patients and
its employees?
We believe that the Mercy Family Medicine Residency at St.
John's Mercy Medical Center fulfills these ideals, and we
believe that we can offer you an excellent opportunity to
become the physician that you hope to be.
Grant Hoekzema, MD, Residency Director
