This summer saw a special anniversary for Onvida Health: the Family and Community Medicine Residency program is celebrating 10 years of graduating residents. Since the program’s inception, 65 family medicine residents have graduated, and they've just begun a psychiatry residency program, too.
“We went from having four residents to all the way, now we have 34 residents in family medicine, so it's growing quite a lot,” said Dr. Kristina Diaz, chief academic officer and director of the residency program.
According to Onvida, 34% of the residents who’ve graduated from its program have stayed in Yuma over the past 10 years. In that time, the program’s maintained a 100% board certification pass rate and continues to attract 2,000 applications each year for eight designated spots.
This year, all but two of the graduating residents are staying in Yuma, which is really “where the secret sauce is” as Diaz put it.
“I think that really just goes to show the culture that we have here at Onvida, the culture that we have in Yuma,” she said, “... So great work by the faculty who train the residents, great work by the staff in the hospital who welcome their residents, and kudos to Yuma for making them feel at home.”
When asked what makes Yuma so special, Diaz replied that “Yuma has so much to offer.”
“And I think one of the most important is location,” she said. “So it's a border town with border problems and underserved problems, but it's also a really unique melting pot. So there's a flood of geriatric patients that happens in the winter, but that includes not just a flood of that age group: you’ve got Canadians and you have Hispanics and you have from all over the country coming because of the fields and because of our agricultural work and visitors that are doing just work here even in the winter.
“... it just provides such a unique learning opportunity because of the vastness of pathology and people that pass through Yuma and so it's really attractive for that reason.”
On the subject of Yuma’s pathology, she explained that they’ve been successful at submitting case studies of patients to local and national conferences. A few examples she recalled off the bat? Dengue fever, testicular tuberculosis and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.
“You'll see things in the emergency room here that you will read about in books,” Diaz commented.
Residents who come to Yuma for the program make a three-year commitment, and they typically work about 70 hours a week with four days off a month.
“They spend about half of their time in their residency program providing care for their own panel of patients and the other half of the time with other specialists learning and honing those skills because when they're done, they'll be on their own, right?” Diaz said.
“But as a primary care physician, you need to know a wide scope of practice. So they, for example, will spend time with a podiatrist, cardiologist, with an oncologist, with the hospitalist, with a surgeon–just really honing in on those skills to be ready to prepare for great care later.”
While they spend a lot of time in in-patient care and clinics, they also spend time doing didactics, meaning they spend one half-day a week doing lecture-style education or simulated learning.
On top of the three years, residents can spend an additional year of training through the sports medicine fellowship.
“And that's an amazing fellowship because they spend so much time giving back to our community and serving our athletes,” Diaz said. “They have their own clinic, but then they also go out to Arizona Western College, where they're the team doc for several sports. They are the team doc for Gila Ridge High School providing care for all of those athletes. They do training room activities. They do sports physicals in town. They do different events like the marathon and the strongman competitions – so definitely out there serving our athletes.
“But, so, it's through service, through structured learning and then, through simulated experience that you get ready to fly and be a physician.”
This July, Onvida also began a psychiatry residency program which entails four years of training.
“That will start with four residents, so four residents over four years so, soon, we'll have 16 residents there which will increase access immensely for behavioral health, which will be so needed and so wonderfully appreciated,” Diaz noted.
Access to healthcare in Yuma has been the main reason for the residency program. Before starting the program in 2013, Onvida Health’s operating board decided to invest in graduate medical education in order to create a pipeline of family medicine physicians.
“That really blossomed and bloomed from the ideas of the operating board,” Diaz said. “They noticed that our population of our physicians and APPs [advanced practice providers] in Yuma were starting to get a little bit older, meaning that we had more physicians that were closer to retirement than not.”
Although there’s no guarantee residents would choose to stay, the 34% retention rate is higher than the national average Diaz quoted, which she stated is 19%. This 2013 study, for example, found that about 19% of family physicians stay within five miles of their residency training site.
“If you think about everywhere that they come from and then they come to this melting pot here and then they stay and they choose Yuma to be their home after they're done training, it's just a great feel for what we can produce, the culture that we have and also they just come in, they fall in love with Yuma,” Diaz said. “And so they fall in love not only with working with Onvida but also with serving in our community and the things that we have to offer here.
“So it was a very positive thing for the hospital to do, and we've now just surpassed seeing our half millionth patient encounter done by the residents recently.”
Note: Onvida Health is a sponsor of KAWC.
This reporting is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
