Adventist Health Central California Network Sonora Program

Program Identity & Fit

This is a faith-based, community-oriented rural training program explicitly designed to produce rural family physicians, with a structural split-site model: PGY-1 in Hanford for high-volume inpatient/OB/pediatric exposure, followed by PGY-2 and PGY-3 in Sonora's rural health clinic and community hospital in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The curriculum emphasizes broad-scope generalist training (inpatient medicine, OB, surgery, orthopedics/sports medicine, geriatrics, population health) rather than subspecialty depth, with longitudinal behavioral health, geriatrics, and health-systems management threads and an option for international/mission elective rotations in PGY-3. Research is not a structural emphasis; the program's identity centers on mission-driven whole-person care and addressing rural health disparities rather than academic scholarship. The program explicitly seeks applicants whose personal statements demonstrate genuine interest in practicing rural family medicine and mission alignment with faith-based, underserved-community care.