Sollus Northwest Family Medicine Residency Celebrates 10-Years of Bringing Doctors to the Yakima Valley

When a students graduate from medical school, they are doctors, but they still need additional hands-on training for their specialty. This training, known as a residency, takes place at hospitals and clinics around the country and usually lasts several years. Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic offers several residency programs to new healthcare providers. One of those programs is Sollus Northwest Family Medicine Residency, which is currently celebrating its 10-year anniversary. The program provides hands-on training for new doctors who are interested in providing care in rural and medically underserved areas.

While the Sollus program itself is just 10 years old, the work to get it started began in 2010, just after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. The ACA provided federal funding for teaching health centers to expand residency training sites beyond traditional urban hospitals and into rural, underserved areas of the country.

Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic recognized this program could be used to bring more doctors to the Yakima Valley. According to Dr. Katheryn Norris, DO, Program Director for Sollus Northwest Family Medicine Residency, if doctors do their residencies here there is a good chance they will stay here.

“Residents will usually practice near where they train,” said Norris.

That means the Sollus residency program not only provides necessary training for new doctors, but it also acts as pipeline to funnel doctors directly into rural central Washington.

Dr. Norris considers the program to be kind of a hidden gem because a residency at a small, rural, clinic in central Washington may not be at the top of many residents’ lists. However, once they arrive, residents quickly discover how much they are valued by their patients and how the limitations of rural health care help them grow professionally.

Unlike residencies at a large hospital, they learn how to work more independently because they just can’t refer a patient to a specialist down the hall. And many patients lack financial resources or transportation that would enable them to see a specialist outside their community.

“It trains physicians how to navigate the system and barriers of care from the onset of their training,” said Norris. “They learn real world medicine from day one.”

Residents participating in the Sollus program are based at Grandview Medical-Dental Clinic but also see patients at other locations.

“They don’t spend all their time at the Grandview clinic,” said Norris. “They have hospital rotations up and down the lower Yakima valley, as well as in the Tri-Cities.”

There are currently 12 residents training in the Sollus program, and, as of June, 28 doctors graduated from the program. In addition, according to Norris, half of those graduates have stayed in the area and most of the others are now providing care in other rural areas.

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“I think they appreciate how much support they receive at Farm Workers, and how rich their training is,” said Norris, “A professional high for me is when there is a physician we trained in the community, and I get feedback like, “I saw so and so, and they were great.”