CHC Family Medicine Residency

By Frank Powers, MD, Program Director, Andy Garrison, MD, Faculty, and Jen Mair, Program Coordinator, CHC Family Medicine Residency

Feature Image: Dr. Frank Powers and patient

Imagine you had the opportunity to create your ideal family medicine residency from scratch. Given that family physicians mostly work in community settings, you’d likely situate your ideal residency in a community-based primary care setting, where most learning occurs through caring for continuity patients. Ideally, the residency might be sponsored by a community health center, rather than a hospital system, so as to maximize focus and institutional resources on a single program. You’d also want to ensure that your residents care for a highly diverse patient population, representing multiple languages and cultures. Furthermore, your residents — especially those wanting to work in rural areas — would need experience working in high-volume tertiary care centers to gain emergency medicine, obstetrics, and inpatient medicine experience. Perhaps most importantly, you’d want the funding for the residency to go directly to your program, instead of sharing funds among a multitude of competing departments. 

Though this vision may seem too good to be true, creating and supporting such primary care residencies is the explicit goal of the Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education (THCGME) program. Since 2010, the THCGME program has funded over 81 community-based residencies which have trained over 2,000 primary care physicians and dentists. To date, Utah has not benefited from this program; though this is about to change. In July 2025, the new Community Health Centers Family Medicine Residency (CHCFMR) will welcome their first class of incoming residents. The program will be the first THCGME program in the state, aiming to train primary care physicians specifically to work in rural and underserved areas. 

Read the full article from the Utah Academy of Family Physicians.