Spokane Teaching Health Center Rural Program

Program Identity & Fit

This is the nation's oldest continuously operating rural family medicine training track, pairing a foundational first year at the Spokane Teaching Health Clinic with two immersive years of full-scope rural practice in Colville or Chewelah, Washington. The training model deliberately builds broad-scope procedural competence—operative obstetrics, endoscopy, surgical office procedures, ER and hospitalist coverage—so graduates can function as the sole or primary physician in frontier settings, and roughly 80% of graduates go on to practice rural medicine, with about half continuing operative OB. Clinical exposure spans a critical-access hospital (Mount Carmel), community clinics in Stevens County, and Spokane's tertiary Sacred Heart Medical Center, giving residents both frontier autonomy and access to regional referral backup. Faculty are themselves largely RTT graduates who returned to practice and teach locally, signaling a program that values continuity, community rootedness, and independent-minded generalists over subspecialization or research output.