Bon Secours Richmond Health System Blackstone Rural Program

Program Identity & Fit

The Blackstone Rural Track of the St. Francis Family Medicine Residency is a small, mission-driven rural track (two residents/year) that pairs inpatient training at the urban/suburban St. Francis Medical Center with outpatient continuity care at one of the only medical clinics serving Blackstone, Virginia, a town of 3,400 with a heavily underserved population. The track is built around high procedural autonomy - joint injections, colposcopies, LARC, I&Ds, trauma, POCUS - reflecting its identity as a full-scope rural family medicine training ground rather than a subspecialty pipeline. Scholarly activity (a peer-reviewed project plus ABFM/IHI modules) is required but framed as a competency to complete, not a career driver, and graduate outcomes skew heavily toward private practice, hospitalist, urgent care, and community health center leadership rather than fellowship or academia. Sponsored by the Catholic, mission-oriented Bon Secours system, the program explicitly values residents drawn to underserved, low-resource, community-embedded practice and comfort with broad-scope procedural independence in a low-resource rural clinic.