Cottage Health will be launching a new pediatric residency program in July, teaching newly graduated medical students both inpatient and outpatient pediatric care while helping to fill a critical need for more local pediatrics staff.
“We’re really excited about this program,” Dr. Steve Barkley, a neonatal medicine specialist at Cottage Health, told Noozhawk. “We think graduate medical education is just part of what we ought to be doing.
“Physicians, especially practicing physicians, have a lot to offer and a lot to teach. I think this is an amazing gift to the residents, but it’s also an amazing gift to the Cottage family and the community.”
Beginning in July, Cottage will choose six recently graduated medical students for the 3-year residency program at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. As those six go on to complete their first year of residency, the nonprofit health-care system will choose six more residents.
When the program is fully running in 2025, there will be 18 pediatric residents.
Barkley said Cottage has already received more than 600 applications, with a “significant portion” of those being international applications.
He said Cottage is looking for applicants who are especially devoted to the idea of supporting the underserved youth population’s health.
“We are looking for people who really see this pediatric training as kind of a part of their calling,” he said. “This is a shared ethic among all the pediatricians who I work with, is that people are really devoted to the idea of supporting children and their health regardless of their ability to pay.
“I really want to leverage that, that sense that runs through the culture of our pediatric community.”
A pediatric residency is a mix of both inpatient and outpatient work, Barkley explained. On the inpatient side, residents will do rotations between the pediatric floor, the pediatric intensive-care units and neonatal ICUs, among others.
“Residents will do those several times during the three years, with each successive year they will become more advanced and receive more responsibility for inpatient care,” he said.
On the outpatient side, Cottage Health has partnered with Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics to teach residents “the gamut of outpatient pediatric work and primary care,” Barkley added.
What’s unique about the residency program, he said, is that Cottage Health is so embedded in the community that it demonstrates the connection between what is happening on the outpatient side and the inpatient side.
All residents will do focus rotations in areas such as developmental-behavioral pediatrics and cardiology, and the residents will have some flexibility on which focus they choose.
“We spend a lot of time with each resident creating a specialized curriculum focused on what they want to do,” Barkley said. “If they are really set in their desire to work for a primary-care setting for the underserved, we will increase exposure to Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics or one of our other partners.”
One of the rotations in the residency program is the community pediatric rotation, which involves other community social partners that are involved with children, such as counseling services and law enforcement, Barkley said.
“More and more we have recognized that a lot of the things that have a profound impact on the health of children aren’t really medical, they’re social,” he said. “One of the things that excites me the most about the program is that Santa Barbara offers a really robust community that’s really invested in the normal development of children.”
Cottage is hopeful that the residency program will contribute to the local physician pool in Santa Barbara, as has been the experience with some of Cottage’s other residency programs, Barkley said.
“It’s really part of our commitment in ensuring the health of the larger regional community for years to come,” he said. “We help develop positions for the physicians that we need.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Jade Martinez-Pogue can be reached at jmartinez-pogue@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.