Sutter Roseville set to become a teaching hospital in 2022, will recruit medical students
Sutter Health became the first institution to announce a medical residency program for Placer County, saying the company’s Roseville hospital will begin training 19 fourth-year medical students in summer 2022 and ultimately expand to 150.
Sutter Roseville Medical Center received accreditation to teach graduate courses in both internal medicine and surgery, company leaders said, so they will be able to compete for talent in the National Residency Matching Program that pairs medical students with teaching hospitals.
“Sutter Roseville is a leading center for the treatment of strokes, heart attacks, traumatic injury, acute rehab and more,” Sutter Roseville CEO Brian Alexander said. “Becoming a teaching hospital with a robust graduate medical education program is an opportunity to pass along that expertise to the next generation of physicians, stay up to speed on emerging best practices, and open doors to more care for our patients.”
The need for physicians is growing rapidly in fast-growing Placer County, said Dr. Peter Hull, Sutter Roseville’s chief medical executive, and that drove Sutter’s decision to found a medical residency program. For many reasons, he said, medical residents often end up practicing in the communities where they trained upon completing their programs.
“Medical students are a little older than they used to be. They aren’t necessarily going directly from college straight into medical school,” Hull said. “They end up often getting life experience, maybe becoming married and often know themselves way better and know what they want.”
Consequently, he said, the choice of residencies is not simply about where they want to train but also where they want to launch their medical careers. The residency program enhances Sutter Roseville’s ability to recruit and retain physicians for the long term, Hull said.
Sutter Health began exploring the idea of founding a medical residency in Placer County about three years ago, he said, and the medical team at the hospital responded enthusiastically to the idea.
They received accreditation for the surgery residency in early 2021 and the internal medicine residency just last month, Hull said, and they are planning to add an emergency medicine residency in 2023 and are looking at other possibilities.
Dr. Jon Perlstein, chair of trauma and acute care surgery at Sutter Roseville, will head up the surgery residency for the hospital. Perlstein already teaches as an associate professor at two universities, and he has served as the surgery program director at David Grant USAF Medical Center in Fairfield.
While Sutter Roseville’s surgery program will welcome six students annually, the internal medicine will bring in 13 a year. They will be able to do rotations in general surgery, thoracic surgery, urology, trauma, plastic surgery, surgical oncology and cardiac surgery, and later in endoscopy, pediatric surgery and transplant and hepato-pancreato-biliary surgery.
Dr. Van Geslani will head up the internal medicine program at the hospital. He has been a chief resident, a core faculty member and associate program director in the internal medicine residency program of Loma Linda University.
He said Sutter’s first class of residents will be able to shape the program from the ground up and, as part of the Roseville team, will serve patients in a wide swath of northeastern California.
The Roseville hospital will be the primary site for training residents, but the students also will be doing some work at two other Sutter facilities: Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento, and the California Pacific Medical Center in the Bay Area.
Sutter Health already has several medical residencies at CPMC and a family residency program at both its Sutter Sacramento and Sutter Santa Rosa campuses.
This story was originally published October 13, 2021 at 10:37 AM.
