Cheshire Medical family residency earns accreditation ahead of 2024 launch

“Our recent ACGME accreditation is an essential step in the development of our residency and demonstrates that our program meets the quality standards required to train new family medicine physicians,” Dr. Karl Dietrich, director of the family medicine residency program, said via email. “With initial accreditation, we can now officially begin recruiting for our first class of resident physicians and continue to work to expand primary care access in our region.”

When up and running, the Dartmouth Health affiliate’s first-ever residency training program will host 18 residents at a time, with six new residents cycled in each year.

Residency is hands-on training doctors undergo after completing medical school. During that training, they diagnose and treat patients under supervision. When complete, they can then practice without supervision.

To make room for the new program, the hospital bought the former Peerless Insurance building on Maple Avenue in Keene, and renovations have begun on what will be a new family medicine clinic there.

Dietrich said the clinic will finish construction and hopefully open by late summer. At that time, he explained faculty physicians and advanced practice providers — which currently see patients at the hospital’s main Court Street campus — will start seeing patients at that new location.

“The goal is to have the clinic up and running for about a year before the residents arrive,” Dietrich said, noting residents are slated to start in July 2024.

For Cheshire Medical, the benefits of the program are clear: First, upward of 10,000 patients will receive care through the clinic. More importantly, doctors who are trained in a rural setting are likely to settle in a rural area, according to hospital spokeswoman Heather Atwell.

Rural areas of New Hampshire mirror the rest of the nation — not enough doctors available, and not enough in the training pipeline for the future.

“We know we don’t have enough primary care physicians in this area. This will create new faculty posts, and the six new residents will be providing primary care for patients,” Dietrich said.

He added that residents will be paired with social service agencies in local towns at the start of their residency, creating a holistic model of health care early on.

“We will be training the next generation of doctors not to just look at what’s going on in their clinic, but what is going on in the community as a whole,” Dietrich said.

He said the goal will be to create as close to one-stop shopping for health care as possible.

“It will take some time, but if we provide a high-quality level of care, people will be excited and [will] want to go to that clinic,” he said.

Atwell likened launching the clinic to creating a new garden. What begins in 2024 is the first planting in what Cheshire Medical hopes will be a long and sustainable harvest of new, rural-oriented doctors.