Providence residency program: training doctors: patients get inexpensive but professional care.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: Health & Medicine

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Anne Musser first traveled to Bethel for two cold, dark winter months when she was a medical student eager to hone her new skills.

"I just fell in love with Alaska," said Musser, an osteopathic family physician originally from California. "As a medical student, I got to go by small plane and snowmachine out to some of the villages to see people, collect injured people. It's just a fantastic state--a wonderful place to be a family physician."

Twenty-seven years later, Musser works as assistant program director for Providence's Alaska Family Medicine Residency program, which provides its resident doctors experience in clinic settings in Anchorage, as well as weeks-long opportunities to practice family medicine in places like Dillingham and Bethel. Providence accepts 12 residents for each year in its three-year program.

"In the Lower 48, family practice has been sort of watered down; in many places we don't get to practice everything we've been taught," Musser said. "Up here, we really have a much broader scope of practice and it's rewarding."

FAMILY CARE FOR ALL

The base for the residency program is Providence's $5 million Family Medicine Clinic, an L-shaped building located on 36th Avenue in Midtown, which received three-fourths of its funding from a federal grant obtained by the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens.

The clinic opened in 2001 and logs 30,000 outpatient visits each year, Musser said. It is one of two clinics in the Anchorage area that continues to accept new Medicare patients. The facility provides office and classroom space for the 36 residents and 12 fulltime faculty members, as well as health care for underserved, uninsured and underinsured patients. Providence sponsors the program, which is academically affiliated with the University of Washington.

The building contains 32 exam rooms, nurses' stations, medical assistant stations, X-ray and laboratory services. Doctors in the community donate their time to oversee the clinic's specialty clinics, which offer such services that include rheumatology and podiatry.

"(Residents) get to learn about lab tests--what's done, how to order tests, what types of specimens are required for different tests," the clinic's laboratory supervisor, Angle Hamill, said.

It was created in 1997 by State leaders and a consortium of physicians led by Dr. Harold Johnston, the program's director, with the intent to train family physicians for the unique aspects of practice in the most...