Spokane Teaching Health Center Program

Program Identity & Fit

This is a community-based, university-affiliated Transitional Year housed at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center, a large tertiary-care referral hospital serving a 1.5+ million person catchment across a multi-state region. The program is built explicitly as a launching pad for specialty-bound trainees, offering thirteen four-week blocks with three tailored electives spanning anesthesia, dermatology, ENT, radiation oncology, neurosurgery, and other subspecialty exposures matched to residents' ultimate fields. Rotation sites include Sacred Heart, Deaconess, and the VA, giving breadth across trauma, surgical subspecialty, and veteran populations, while close collaboration with co-located Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Psychiatry residencies signals an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning over isolated training. The program values continuity and community fit heavily—residents themselves participate substantially in interview selection, and the director highlights a decades-long pattern of graduates returning to Spokane after specialty training, indicating that cultural fit and long-term regional attachment are explicitly prized.