Scripps Mercy Hospital Program

Program Identity & Fit

Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego is a large safety-net, community-based teaching hospital serving a high-acuity, medically complex, underserved urban population, functioning as the busiest ED and one of six Level I trauma centers in San Diego County with a fellow-free, resident-run ICU. The program balances a genuine primary care continuity clinic at a federally qualified health center with heavy subspecialty exposure (structural heart, EP, interventional GI, EBUS) and a nationally recognized, three-decade-old POCUS/CLUE curriculum that produces certified point-of-care ultrasonographers by intern year. Research is structurally supported but not the program's central identity: dedicated research blocks, an internal research committee, and SHARC collaboration with UCSD/Scripps Research exist alongside a roughly 40% fellowship / 60% hospitalist-primary care outcome split, indicating a program built to produce well-rounded generalist internists and hospitalists as much as subspecialists. Distinctive features include a required underserved-medicine rotation with homeless outreach and MAT clinic exposure, X+Y ambulatory scheduling, no in-house critical-care fellows (maximizing resident procedural autonomy), and a mission language explicitly centered on service to marginalized populations.