UIC receives HHS grant to expand family medicine residency program

The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine has received a $1.92 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to expand its family medicine residency program.

The grant will fund two additional family medicine residents each year for five years beginning next July. The department currently has six residents in each of the three training years.

The grant, part of the Affordable Care Act Primary Care Residency Expansion Program, comes from the Health Resources and Services Administration. The grant was awarded to principal investigator Dr. Memoona Hasnain, director of research, and co-principal investigators Dr. Mark Potter, residency director, and Dr. Abbas Hyderi, assistant clinical professor and assistant dean of undergraduate medical education.

"This is not just a mechanical expansion of our program," Hasnain said. "We will be able to refine and improve our curriculum with a focus on training and developing more competent and caring providers with special skills for providing quality care to underserved populations."

The grant will offer the opportunity to enhance teaching in health communication, health literacy, global health and women's health, as well as expand the resident scholarship program.

"This grant builds on the successes of the department in educational innovation and excellence," Hasnain said. "Much of what we will be developing in underserved medicine for residency training has been initiated through our undergraduate programs, including the unique Patient-centered Medicine Scholars Program."

Hasnain says the goal is to engage residents in educational experiences that enable them to acquire core attitudes, values and competencies related to providing high-quality, patient-centered, culturally appropriate care to all patients, particularly those who are underserved and vulnerable. According to Potter, half of the department's graduates in the last six years have practices located in federally designated medically underserved areas, and 90 percent continue to practice primary care.

All residency applicants are expected to have a history of community service, and that requirement will be extended to the residents brought in through the grant.

"We'll be putting these new residents into specific areas we already work in," Potter said. "For example, a central element of the new residents' training will be the opportunity to work at Mile Square Health Center throughout the three years of their residency training."

As a federally qualified health center, Mile Square provides care to an underserved population, including people without health insurance or covered by Medicare and Medicaid. It offers a full spectrum of medical, dental and psychiatric services and has a community board with patient representation.

"Learning to work with the community they are serving is an important aspect of the training offered by UIC," Potter said. "The selection of trainees with potential for this work, coupled with training in underserved medicine throughout residency training, increases the likelihood that our graduates will go on to provide primary care to underserved populations."

UIC ranks among the nation's leading research universities and is Chicago's largest university with 26,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.