Western Wisconsin Rural Family Medicine Residency

The HealthPartners Western Wisconsin Rural Family Medicine Residency Program offers a distinctive three year experience, blending urban and rural training in a 1-2 model. First year of the residency 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.

Rural residency track 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 program is sponsored by HealthPartners Institute and accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Development of the residency is supported by a grant from the Wisconsin Rural Physician Residency Assistance Program.

Learn more about the Western Wisconsin Rural Residency program

Program leadership

Residency training faculty

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Residency experience

The western Wisconsin family medicine clinics are at the heart of our residency program. Several aspects of the clinic experience are important in our success.

In the first year, residents will spend one to two half days in clinic at Park Nicollet-Creekside. The clinic patient population is a diverse, high-acuity population with about 11,000 visits annually. Residents care for patients with medical and social complexities, working regularly with interpreters (Spanish, Somali, Bosnian and Russian are among the common languages), The patient population closely mirrors that of St. Louis Park with diversity in ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and age.

The family medicine clinics at Amery Hospital & Clinic and Westfields Hospital & Clinic each have over 26,000 visits annually. The clinic populations are typical for rural health care settings. Responding to the community needs assessment, the clinics work to address mental and behavioral health care needs, access and affordability issues, chronic disease and illness prevention, and equitable care.