Family Medicine Residency Spots in Seattle Area Axed

Two family medicine residency programs in the Seattle-Tacoma area are folding or downsizing, raising concerns about physician shortages in already underserved areas.

Tacoma’s Community Health Care is shuttering its family medicine residency, losing eight positions per year, and Providence Swedish is merging its Cherry Hill and First Hill family medicine residencies, cutting six positions per year in Seattle.

Each of those graduating physicians would have cared for about 1,800 patients per year, Becca Wolinsky, MD, a third-year family medicine resident in Seattle, wrote in an op-ed in the Seattle Times.

“When our region loses 14 family physician trainees annually, 25,000 patients will be left without a doctor per year,” Wolinsky wrote. “Imagine even longer wait times for routine care and the trickle-down impacts on already-overwhelmed ERs and specialty services.”

Russ Sondker, a spokesperson for Tacoma Community Health Care, said the organization is trying to save the family medicine residency program by getting neighboring health system MultiCare to take it on, but at this point it’s a “Hail Mary.”

Sondker said his facility is a federally qualified health center (FQHC). “The residency program is important for us because it gave us a lot of healthcare professionals who could provide a lot of care,” he told MedPage Today. “That really helped us increase the number of patients served. It’s going to be a big loss.”

He confirmed that residents going into their second or third (and final) year with the program will be able to continue, but those who completed their first year and those recruited to start in July all had to find new positions.

Providence Swedish said its family medicine residency program was the only one running at a “significant” deficit, losing more than $6 million annually, with projected losses growing each year, according to a slide deck shared with MedPage Today.

Ed Boyle, a spokesperson for Providence Swedish, told MedPage Today in an email that the family medicine program will now train 51 residents.

No current residents will lose their positions, and “resident levels will remain unchanged through June 2027,” he added.

“This decision aligns with the consolidation of acute services from our Cherry Hill campus to our First Hill flagship campus; the broader transformation, integration, and modernization of our urban Seattle campuses; and the opening of our new medical tower,” Boyle said in the email. “It also reflects the need to adapt the program’s structure in response to significant and ongoing financial and operational pressures – challenges healthcare systems across the country are navigating today.”

Initially, nine positions were going to be cut from the Providence Swedish program, but three of them were transferred to a program in Olympia, Washington, according to a graduate of the residency program who asked not to be named.

Some of the residents put together a petition calling for Providence Swedish to save the residency positions.

One current resident who asked not to be named told MedPage Today that Providence Swedish hosted some town halls to discuss the changes.

“They gave us a lot of financial [reasons] … saying that family medicine programs lose the hospital system money,” the resident said. “We don’t do very expensive surgeries, sure, but to look at the value of our work, you have to look at emergency room visits, the severity of chronic disease, preventive healthcare, cancer screenings, all of these things that improve the quality of public health.”

“But they decide to look at their numbers in a way that diminishes the value of family medicine,” the resident added.

The petition also raises concerns about the impact of losing residents on local community health institutions, including the Seattle Indian Health Board, which cares for Native American and Alaska Native patients; Sea Mar Community Health Centers, which serve the area’s Spanish-speaking population; the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center, the only remaining Black Panther clinic in the U.S.; and International Community Health Services, an FQHC based in the area’s Chinatown district.

The former resident noted that the Providence Swedish family medicine residency program in Seattle has existed since the 1970s and is known for training leaders in the family medicine community.

“Over the years, having that many fewer physicians is going to compound over time,” that resident said. “In 10 years, it will be much harder to find a doctor [in the Seattle-Tacoma area] because all these doctors that would have moved here to train, and then stayed to practice, won’t be here.”