Curriculum

At SSRFMR, you will have access to a full-spectrum family medicine curriculum, grounded in a commitment to leadership and community. We encourage every resident to participate in leadership projects, professional organizations, or community engagements that align with what matters most to them.

What to Expect

Community-centered health care is at the core of our curriculum - from primary care at Santa Rosa Community Health Center-Vista Campus, to inpatient adult medicine and obstetrics inpatient care at Sutter’s community hospital, Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital. Hands-on experience throughout the community and North Bay prepares trainees with the skills and perspectives to care for patients at all stages of life, including integrative and addiction medicine training from our fellows.

Your training will take you from collaborative team-based clinic care to care for acute and chronic health conditions, to complex adult medicine rounds, and high-risk perinatal care. Local training is supplemented by additional pediatric experiences at the Children’s Hospital of Oakland and clinical experiences at other hospitals and clinics throughout the North Bay of California. You will also nurture empathic coaching skills to support behavior changes and long-term health for your patients. On Thursdays, you’ll join your class for a dedicated hour of personal and professional growth.

Ambulatory Curriculum

Having their continuity clinics at a community health center offers trainees experience in this critical piece of health care access in the United States. Training at Santa Rosa Community Health (SRCH), as well as interacting with many other local community health centers, encourages trainees to develop special skills required to overcome the challenges of working with un- or underinsured patient populations.

All residents get training in the chronic care model, planning care through the use of the clinic "huddle," and using a disease registry for chronic disease management. Recognizing the central role of patient self-management in chronic illness, the residency provides specific training for physicians to support patient behavior change.

Didactic Curriculum

Didactics are integrated throughout the schedule and supported by core faculty and community faculty from various specialties. Our outpatient teaching involves family medicine and pediatric topic reviews before each continuity clinic and protected time every Thursday afternoon for dedicated teaching, including lectures, hands-on workshops, and case-based learning. Specialty clinics ensure hands-on teaching in point-of-care ultrasound and outpatient procedures. Inpatient and obstetric teams participate in daily didactics, as well as weekly grand rounds. Our integrative and addiction medicine fellowships and HIV and reproductive health pathways provide additional opportunities for specific teaching.

Our teaching is supported by best practices gained through our educational collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco, and our faculty’s completion of faculty development fellowships, as well as ongoing collaboration in local faculty education and development.

Core Outpatient Didactic Topics Include:

• Integrative medicine
• Musculoskeletal care
• Psychiatry and behavioral health
• Gender affirming care
• Reproductive and obstetrical health
• Dermatology
• Procedures
• Addiction medicine
• Pediatrics
  • Clinical reasoning, journal club, and morbidity & mortality case review
• Many other core topics in family medicine