FAMILY MEDICINE RESIDENCY OVERVIEW

Family medicine residents truly have "the best of both worlds" in training opportunities. We are part of a well-respected university and medical school, and Boston is a city known throughout the world for its teaching hospitals and quality of life.

Cambridge Health Alliance and Tufts University share the belief that Family Medicine training requires a strong community experience. Residents' main clinical home is the new CHA Family Medicine Center, the anchor of a 76,000 square foot ambulatory care building that opened in June 2007. The CHA Malden Family Medicine Center is a state-of-the-art facility with Epic electronic health record, computers in all 33 exam rooms, 4 conference rooms, 4 procedure rooms, group visit space, and resident office space with 27 computer work stations. Our main admitting hospital is the Whidden campus in nearby Everett, MA. Tufts Family Medicine residents are the only residents in this busy community hospital, located on a hill overlooking Boston.

This undivided commitment to Tufts Family Medicine residents enhances the quality of their training experience. Residents will continue to benefit from carefully selected regular rotations and elective rotations at our tertiary partner, Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. They may also choose to do electives at other Tufts-affiliated hospitals, other Boston teaching hospitals, and away from Boston, including international rotations.

Malden is an ideal type of community for the residency's Family Medicine center. Six miles north of Boston and served by Boston's MBTA subway system, Malden is a socio-economically diverse community with an unusual variety of cultures and ethnic groups. Some of our largest patient populations' ancestries include Italian, Irish, Eastern European, Haitian, African-American, Vietnamese, and Korean. Malden has the third-largest Chinese-American population in Massachusetts. Our Whidden campus cares for a large Latino population which allows for additional resident exposure to a large Spanish-speaking population. Although most of our patients speak English, we will have extensive interpreter services readily available. Malden has always valued family physicians and enthusiastically supports the residency and new Family Medicine center.

Tufts family medicine residents learn a lot by teaching. We are the primary family medicine clerkship site for Tufts University School of Medicine and will also train students from Harvard, Boston University, UMass, and throughout the US and Canada. Our residents will teach their colleagues, students, and faculty by regularly presenting "mini lectures" at our daily conferences, on hospital rounds, and teaching medical students during patient care. They also have a great deal of input into their own residency training; all residents and faculty will meet weekly to discuss new ideas and our chief residents will attend all faculty meetings.

Our faculty possesses creativity, energy, and a strong commitment to resident education. They have helped establish our reputation for academic excellence, publishing in major textbooks of family medicine and presenting lectures at local, statewide, and national medical conferences. Besides our residency and community-based faculty in Malden, other faculty members are based at Cambridge Health Alliance's office practices. Our medical school-based faculty have an important teaching role in the residency as well.