Family Medicine Residency Program

Neil Sparks

I think you should choose Wake Forest primarily because of the people.

Lisa Cassidy-Vu

The people, of course, is our number one, which I think you're probably going to hear that a lot.

Kiran Mullur

The answer will always be the same. It's the people. It's overwhelmingly the people.

Brian Gottwalt

I think that made my decision of where I wanted to go a lot clearer. It took a couple weeks until I really felt like I got an awesome, accurate representation of what the program was like, and fortunately we have an orientation where they walk us through the beginning steps of what it is to be an intern and how to function at a high level.

Maggie Hansell

So when you get here, there's a really well-thought-out orientation to get you familiar with our hospital, our community, and your new family in family medicine. There are things including the community plunge, where you actually get in a car with your peers and some faculty and go drive around and see the city, where your patients are coming from, what resources are available to them. You have an opportunity with some of the other physicians here to walk through a patient encounter, so get to know a patient and go all the way through their visit with them and see what our clinic's like from the other side before you get started.

Brian Gottwalt

And once we really started getting through that, I got much more accurate glimpses of what the program was like and I loved it. The faculty here are so dedicated to taking care of the interns and walking us through this really intense educational process in our careers and making sure that we come out the other side better physicians for it.

Keli Jones

We really are able to be in a unique position to blend the big academic medical experience, academic medical center experience, with a community feel. So while we're a part of a huge tertiary care hospital, at the same time, our clinic is very community-focused, and we spend a lot of our time in various parts of the community as well, reaching out to different populations that are here. And it's really rare to be able to find a place that you get the feel of both and get the experience of both in a three-year training program.

Michelle K Keating

We want to provide you with the best training rotations resources possible. We recognize you are adult learners, and so anything we try to do, we try to give you autonomy with support and at the same time make sure it's immediately applicable to what you're doing.

Neil Sparks

We recognize that everybody is on their own path, and part of the goal is to work together and collaborate with the faculty to figure out, how do we support and nurture that?

Daniel Binder

I had some interests, but I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted my life to look like when I graduated, and really I felt this program was going to prepare me to do anything that I wanted to when I graduated.

Brian Gottwalt

So my very first rotation was our family medicine inpatient service, which, again, is an independent service within the hospital system just for the family medicine training program. And the patients we had on there were people from the age of two to all the way up into their eighties and nineties. And the amount of variety in terms of ages and pathology was something that was so far above and beyond what I ever expected to actually get in an individual program's own FM inpatient service, so I loved it and I learned a ton on it.

Sarah K Nullmeyer

My favorite rotation is probably our family medicine inpatient service. We take care of any patient from our clinic or some of the surrounding family medicine clinics that are hospitalized, and so we get this kind of neat continuity where we know the patient in their healthy state, and then when they're not healthy, we can see the differences.

Travis K Bryan

We get so much exposure to so many different specialties and get to work on rotations with different specialties as well too, which are incredible experiences, honestly. And in Winston-Salem, it's awesome because we have such a varied population that we work with here. We work with very high-affluent people to people that are less affluent as well, and we see them every day in our clinic too, so we get really comfortable across the population treating everybody.

Keli Jones

You'll have the opportunity to work at various clinics within the Winston-Salem area, including our federally qualified health centers, Centro Clinico, which is a Spanish-speaking clinic, as well as Bethesda and Highland Avenue. All of those clinics will provide you an opportunity to serve and work with our underserved population here within Winston-Salem.

Neil Sparks

Residents will spend time at Peace Haven Family Medicine, which gives them a chance to see family medicine, how it's practiced in a common outpatient setting with community doctors in a community setting. Our urgent care experience is focused primarily on acute problems, same-day access, and is divided into two different locations, both at Piedmont Plaza and our Clemens location. And our Piedmont Plaza office is the primary training site for residents, where they'll build their continuity panels and see patients through all three years of care here.

Keli Jones

There are three main hospitals within the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Network that our residents are at. The main campus is where most things happen and most rotations are, but we also have both Davie and High Point Medical Center, where residents get a feel for more of the community hospital setting, both in the emergency room as well as on wards.

Richard Lord

One of the things we strive to be is family and community medicine, so we're really about taking care of our patients here at the Family Medicine Center, but also being out in the community. So for those folks that like being in the community and taking care of all walks of life, all types of folks, we provide that here at Wake.

Cole Phillips

At Wake, we take care of really sick people, and oftentimes they're sick because of things that are outside of their control. They don't have access to the right food. They don't have access to healthcare. They don't have insurance. And I think a lot of physicians became physicians because they kind of like being those folks that run into the fire. It's just a really important aspect of our training, and Winston-Salem offers that. And it's not a good thing. We want it to not be an issue anymore. But we're learning actively how to combat those things.

Alicia Firestone

We get to go out to Stokes County Health Department, which is kind of an underserved area about an hour outside of town. We do a lot of prenatal care and contraception counseling out there, so that's been really a lot of fun for me. We go to Centro Clinico, which is a Spanish-speaking predominantly clinic that we do a lot of care there with those folks.

Richard Lord

I routinely hear from the president of our health system, who's an internist, how he loves having our residents on their service when he's on the inpatient side. From the head of GI, the head of the emergency room, they love having our residents there. And so our residents and faculty have created a sense of respect across the board, which has been unique for academic institutions, I think, and I have not found another institution that.

Maggie Hansell

People are really good at talking to each other about a specific patient or including our residents in their learning experiences, and we do the same for them, so there's just a lot of shared learning and excitement about education in this environment.

Kiran Mullur

Somehow Wake Forest does a job of bringing a group of people together and creating and nurturing this community where they can become the best versions of themselves, the best doctors, and the best people.

Cole Phillips

Which is so cool, because I think you graduate med school, and you're like, "All right, I did it. I'm done." And it's like, actually, you don't know anything.

Kiran Mullur

You don't know... You know zero.

Cole Phillips

I didn't know anything. And you're in training, and I think we forget that. And all programs, I think, there's so many great programs out there, but finding that group of folks that are going to help you, like Kiran said, grow into this person that you're becoming, the physician that you're becoming, that's kind of like forgotten, I think, a lot in how we do things and-

Keli Jones

You just don't find the caliber of colleagues from a faculty perspective that you can find here anywhere else, and you certainly don't find the caliber of resident at any other program. The privilege that I get as a program director is to work with 30 amazing young doctors, and it's because not just of their education coming into this and then through this training program, but it's who they are, and it's the reason that they are going to be incredible world changers.

Sarah K Nullmeyer

I know it's so cliche, but they say you know when... When I came here and met the people, I was like, "This is it." I felt comfortable talking with who I would be precepting with. I felt comfortable with the other residents. I knew that if I had a hard day, I'd have backup and people there to support me. And it really is a family. We're family medicine, but we really are a family in family medicine. So I would choose it again in a heartbeat.