New residency program at McLaren Port Huron increases access to primary care, family medicine

McLaren Port Huron recently launched a new Graduate Medical Education (GME) program, bringing 10 new medical residents to the community. The new program includes six internal medicine residents working with Dr. Sivateja Mandava, and four family medicine residents working with Dr. Gary James. 

Dr. James is the director of the family medicine residency program at McLaren Port Huron. He helps with recruitment, retention, interviewing prospective resident candidates, managing faculty, and outpatient clinic training. James says the program aims to offset the aging population of physicians and retiring practitioners and hopes to recruit physicians to the Blue Water Area.

“It is a market right now where a physician can complete their residency and go practice anywhere in the country. A lot of them are choosing the South, the Coasts, and the mountain areas but they’re not choosing the Midwest,” he says. “We decided it would be in the best interest of McLaren Port Huron and the community to open a residency program.”  

James says the numbers show that residency programs have a retention rate for residents in their working communities of about 25% to 30%. That equates to about one in four residents staying after their training is finished, to work in that same hospital or community. 

The Family Medicine residency received certification in April. They received 400 applications and interviewed 40 people for the four spots. 

“The residents are all new to Port Huron, but have all spent time in Michigan doing rotations throughout hospitals as third and fourth-year students,” James says. 

Throughout the next three years, residents will focus on medicine and their clinic, OBGYN, rotations in emergency medicine, ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, hematology, oncology, and other fields. Residents will receive education, training, and administration from core faculty including Dr. Reid Stromberg, Dr. Hira Khan, Dr. Myuren Gunaratnam, and Ellen Hoover. They will be under the direction of Dr. Beau Dowden, family medicine physician at McLaren Port Huron Academic Center for Family Medicine. 

“In addition to getting behavioral science training, they’re getting psychiatric training and they’re also getting community experiences,” James says. “They’ll spend time with athletic trainers at local sporting events, in shelters and community outreach programs of their choice, and in nursing homes.”

Residents receive a stipend through McLaren Hospital, which James says is competitive compared to the national average of residency pay. Residents will work at the internal medicine and family medicine residency building, a free-standing clinic behind McLaren Hospital off Stone Street. 

“It’s open to the community,” James says. “They’ll have regular patients that will be proctored by regular attending physicians. The residents who have graduated from medical school, but are still in training will have their own patient population for people to sign up with them.”

So far, James says the response has been positive from hospital staff and administration. He understands that there is some hesitancy from physicians to train students because of the time commitment it takes to teach residents. 

“As time goes on, they realize that this benefits their practice and their hospital,” James says. “These are extra providers that are fully licensed and insured doctors that can help out with patients and the demand that the community has put on the shortage of physicians in the area.”

The program seeks to add four family medicine residents each year, reaching its full maturation of 12 residents by 2026. James hopes primary care physicians can provide more services locally so patients don’t have to travel to larger cities and hospitals for their treatments or specialists.