Lawrence Family Medicine Residency, the nation’s first Teaching Health Center founded in 1994, is committed to providing residents not only strong clinical experience but also an academic environment that encourages the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. Our culture of innovation and our strong connections and integration with the community actually offer superior opportunities to produce community and primary care-oriented research. We do not see “Scholarly Activity” as an ACGME requirement to check-off but rather an obligation to our community and our residents to strive for excellence.
For family medicine, a Teaching Health Center organizational structure provides a great foundation for scholarly activity. With EHRs, research is increasingly becoming more easily “doable” in community health centers like ours (with 65,000 patients, over 270,000 visits annually) rather than exclusively academic health center environments that often do not mirror a family medicine-served patient population.
Our residency is engaged with multiple national medical education research endeavors through our specialty’s Length of Training national demonstration study, the CAFM Education Research Alliance (CERA) Surveys, and work with the ABFM Research Division. Our two affiliated medical schools (UMass and Tufts) offer additional academic resources besides the Research Division we have built over the years here in Lawrence.
Our residency remains one of the country’s most active participants in academic presentations at national family medicine education meetings; both residents and faculty are strongly encouraged to regularly present their work outside of Lawrence, at national, regional, and statewide family medicine meetings.
