Frequently asked questions
If your question isn’t answered here, feel free to send us an e-mail at [email protected].
Yes. With Kaiser Permanente, you will work in a primary care clinic that covers broad-spectrum outpatient family medicine. You will be supervised by faculty with varying backgrounds who maintain active practices in area clinics. You will also have rotations in hospitals, community primary care clinics, and specialty clinics with different affiliations, affording you the opportunity to see a wide range of clinical settings. This program will prepare you for an academic or community practice in an urban, rural, or international setting. Our training also offers opportunities for personal growth in leadership, teaching, innovation, and informatics. Graduates from our program have gone to various locations and types of practices.
Excellent! Kaiser Permanente Washington is a care delivery system built on a strong family medicine foundation. The specialists who work here understand both the role of family medicine and how they can best assist. Specialists are readily available by e-mail, phone, and in person to help us learn and care for our patients. Our mutual goal is to provide the highest quality care at the point of contact, so it's in everyone's interest that the family physician can identify and treat most common issues and refer for true specialized procedures and care. When those referrals are necessary, we can connect patients to the right care.
Obstetrics is one of the strengths of our program. Obstetrics training includes a combination of longitudinal training on the labor and delivery unit at Swedish hospital and the care of continuity obstetrical patients from the residency clinics. Care on L&D is managed together with obstetricians and family medicine attendings from Kaiser Permanente, including two core faculty who are fellowship-trained and continue to perform C-sections. We also work together with the Kaiser Permanente midwives. Residents are able achieve the necessary deliveries to graduate with competency to practice OB independently, and historically more than 30% of our residents practice OB following graduation.
Capitol Hill cares for a diverse urban population located in the heart of Seattle. Burien cares for a diverse population that lives at the periphery of Seattle and has a higher mix of racial and cultural diversity and lower socioeconomic status. The Capitol Hill clinic is co-located with the Kaiser Permanente Washington Consultative Specialty Center and Urgent Care Center. Burien is a small to moderate size primary care clinic. Residents from both training sites share the same curriculum of inpatient and outpatient rotations. Please feel free to inquire for more information about either of these sites.
- The Capitol Hill Campus Match number is 1811120C0
- The Burien Medical Center Match number is 1811120C1
We work with medical students in our family medicine clinic, at Seattle Children's Hospital, and on some inpatient rotations. Senior residents often teach and sometimes supervise junior residents. Additionally, seniors play a key educational role for the new residents during orientation and the initial shifts in clinic, OB, and medicine. There are opportunities for third-year residents to serve as co-preceptors for their colleagues in clinic during the last 6 months of residency. All residents present as part of didactics and many participate in research, quality improvement projects and presentations together with faculty at local and national conferences. Several of our graduates have pursued teaching careers following graduation.
Recent grads have joined a variety of practice settings, including rural practice, urban clinics, inner- city underserved, community health centers, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), academics, and fellowships. Some graduates have specialized their scope in urgent care, occupational medicine, geriatrics, leadership, or health administration. Our full-spectrum training program that is the only residency in a system caring for 700,000 patients is designed to ensure that graduates have the ability and the confidence to excel in whatever practice environment they choose. The majority of graduates have chosen to stay in the greater Seattle area and Washington state, but our graduates are practicing all over the nation.
The Kaiser Permanente-model HMO, otherwise known as an integrated group practice, is an ideal clinical setting because the family physician and the patient are at the center of a large system of support. The family physician provides the majority of care for most patients, coordinates additional care with specialists if needed, and makes decisions about testing, referrals, treatment, follow-up, hospitalizations, and more. There are no significant restrictions to diagnostic and treatment options. This is possible because of the quality of the family doctors within the system. We benefit from the use of evidence-based medicine and best practice guidelines, created and periodically reviewed by committees of Kaiser Permanente Washington, which serve as examples of gold-standard care for doctors in the clinic. Our formulary also is managed by a committee made up of clinicians. Rarely will providers need (or want) to prescribe outside the formulary, but in those cases, exceptions can be made.
The Family Medicine Residency's patient population reflects the richness of the settings in and near Seattle. Patients represent the entire spectrum of racial, cultural, age, and socioeconomic diversity. Among our clinic patients, 30 percent are of a race other than white, 26 percent have government-subsidized insurance, and 12 percent speak a language other than English in their home. Interpreters are readily available for the wide range of languages spoken. Each resident is the primary provider for a panel of approximately 400 patients that they care for throughout residency.
In Seattle, it rains frequently during the winter, but not heavily. We get 37 inches of rain annually, placing Seattle 44th on the list of U.S. cities for rainfall, behind Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, Houston, and Miami. On the other hand, it is often cloudy, though locals do not usually let that get in their way. Seattle is a surprisingly outdoorsy city considering its reputation for rain, and the weather in the summertime is hard to beat.