Welcome to Contra Costa Family Medicine Residency

Program Director Message

Hello and welcome to the Contra Costa Family Medicine Residency website. It is a great honor for me to get to know medical students each year as we open our hearts, minds, and doors to applicants and families interested in learning more about our full-spectrum, unopposed Family Medicine Residency Program.

I worked for over a decade in full-spectrum family medicine—providing primary care in my Family Medicine Clinic, teaching full-time as a Family Medicine Registrar within the inpatient Internal Medicine services, providing procedural care and supervision in many settings, and servings as an Internal Medicine consultant to our Emergency Services and beyond. My rich clinical experience grew out of the broad and deep training I received here at Contra Costa from 1991-1994 and an OB-clinical fellowship in 1995.

I began my Residency leadership role here in 1997 when I helped found the Residency Leadership Group—a group of highly motivated family physicians, behavioralists, and chief residents who help shape the future direction of our program. In those 10 years I have seen tremendous changes in our program. Facing work-hour constraints, the need to elevate our ambulatory training and a wish to expand our personal and professional development curriculum we completed a several-year expansion of our program in 2005—going from 9 residents per year to 13 per year over a 5-6 year period ! Nearly 100% of the ideas that led to these changes came from the minds and hearts of our residents. Our residents are the greatest source of innovation in our program.

Through these years of change we have maintained the core, precious aspects of our program: high resident responsibility in patient care, one-on-one supportive Registrar teaching and supervision, developing meaningful mentorship and teacher:learner relationships throughout our curriculum, hands-on training from day 1, and finding joy in the full-spectrum care of the underserved.

Every year we are astonished at the volume of high-quality medical students applying to our Community-based, County-sponsored, UC Davis Affiliated Family Medicine Residency Program. I attribute that success to the ideas and passion of our residents and faculty, the courage of our Residency Leadership Group, and the keen support of our Residency Program throughout our organization.

The Contra Costa Family Medicine Residency program has over 60 physician faculty and over 20 nurse faculty training our residents every day. Family Physicians are integrated into all major teaching services and provide leadership roles throughout the program and our organization.

If you seek a vibrant program able to provide you a remarkable breadth and depth of full-spectrum family medicine training, you have come to the right place. Here are just a few examples of the incredible training opportunities available here:

Extensive practical and procedural Obstetrics. Be ready to provide OB care in a Global, rural, suburban or urban setting. The breadth of training here prepares you to be an effective and safe OB provider in any setting—particularly for underserved populations.

Hospital Based Medicine from Surgical, Medical and Family Medicine perspectives. Residents care for all our inpatients across the medical-surgical spectrum with one-on-one Registrar teaching that provides you the ability to make decisions with a seasoned attending who is right there with you every day for your entire rotation. We call this serial apprenticeship. Our residents and registrars develop very close relationships, and it is through those relationships that the most meaningful learning occurs. We don’t make you rotate on more inpatient services—we help you learn the most while you are there.

Procedural training across all specialties. We are well known as a program that teaches a wide array of procedures to residents, from punch biopsies to surgical obstetrics, and we are committed to this for one important reason: we find the underserved often have frighteningly poor access to procedural care. Since we want our graduates to be able to care for the underserved no matter where they are or what they need we provide our residents with expansive procedural training. Our residents generally become comfortable with a wide array of procedures—from endometrial biopsies to endoscopy, from suturing to minor surgeries, from cryotherapy to running codes.

Community-based Family Medicine Clinic training. Our residents provide a medical home for patients in Martinez, Pittsburg, Concord, Richmond and North Richmond. We are in the process of opening a Resident clinic in Antioch. Our regional clinics are highly effective ways to bring our residents into the communities they serve—seeing upfront the challenges their patients face every day. We recently developed a Lead Preceptor group which is a highly selected group of Family Medicine Clinic-based teachers who are advancing our FMC-based training every day.

Health Systems Management, Problem-Based Learning and Personal and Professional Development. Few applicants recognize the strength of our Health Systems Management (HSM) and Personal and Professional Development (PPD) curriculum. We have learned over the years that residents learn complex challenges and develop more effectively if they meet in groups during protected time (usually by class) in a longitudinal fashion. We have extensive group-based, longitudinal curriculum in HSM, Problem-Based Learning (PBL), and PPD, which helps develop the leadership, policy, clinical, and personal development of our residents, preparing them to be effective physician leaders for the underserved.

These are just a few short examples of the tremendous training we have to offer here. I have had the great fortune to be the Program Director here at Contra Costa since 2004. I come to work every day inspired by our residents and faculty and delighted to face our next challenge.

Thank you again for taking a look at our program, and feel free to contact me if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions about our website or our program.

Warmly,

Jeremy M. Fish, M.D.
Residency Director
Contra Costa Family Medicine Residency
Martinez, CA
jfish@ccfamilymed.com