St Luke's University Hospital Program

Program Identity & Fit

This is Pennsylvania's first accredited Rural Psychiatry Residency, a four-year program explicitly built to train psychiatrists for practice in underserved rural counties (Schuylkill and Carbon) rather than urban academic centers. The curriculum is structured around community and rural infrastructure: rural health clinics, federally qualified health centers in Tamaqua, ED crisis work at Miners and the Behavioral Health Walk-In Center, inpatient and geriatric psychiatry at Lehighton, addiction medicine at Sacred Heart and St. Luke's Penn Foundation, and child/adolescent rotations at KidsPeace and Easton, giving residents broad exposure across the lifespan and care settings within a rural network. Continuity outpatient care anchored in a dedicated rural behavioral health office and weekly FQHC clinic sessions signals a strong primary-care-adjacent, community psychiatry orientation rather than a subspecialty research pipeline. The program draws its residents from a mix of US MD, DO, and IMG backgrounds and appears to value trainees committed to practicing psychiatry in resource-limited, rural settings.