We are thrilled to launch the VCU Health Community Memorial Hospital (CMH) Family Medicine Residency Program. This new rural track program combines the experience of a growing community-based hospital with VCU’s Department of Family Medicine, dedicated to excellence in family medicine education, clinical practice and research for over 50 years. We will welcome our first class of three residents on July 1, 2024 and build to a 3-3-3 program over the first three years.

As part of the VCU Health system, this rurally located family medicine residency program will be directly supported by the VCU School of Medicine graduate medical education system and VCU’s tertiary academic medical system in nearby Richmond, Va. This infrastructure and support will provide immense opportunity for high quality training and positively impact the health of the areas we serve.

As the founding program director, I am committed to an innovative program with strong resident and community voices. Our curriculum responds to the health challenges facing our nation, and creates leaders in healthcare that will transform systems to realize meaningful progress. This will require a diverse family medicine workforce, both in personal characteristics and career choice within the discipline. We maximize personal training plans to give the breadth of experience needed to be an excellent family medicine physician and in-depth opportunities in individual areas of interest. We have a wide range of faculty and resources to support your career interests from independent rural practice to academic research.

A community voice has been at the heart of our program development. The Hayes E. Willis Health Center (HWHC) opened in a neighborhood of South Richmond in October 1993 to remove South Richmond barriers to primary healthcare services. Our residency clinic is embedded in the VCU Health Hayes E. Willis Health Center for the first year of training. VCU works with the surrounding community to incorporate wrap around services needed to break down barriers to care such as on-site pharmacy, social work and behavioral health.

Community Memorial Hospital, our primary training site, was founded “by the community, for the community” in 1954. The Chamber of Commerce, local school system, local businesses, and the providers and staff at VCU Health CMH have been working directly with us to create this residency program. This sense of community and support makes this residency program special and provides education beyond the walls of the clinics and hospitals. Our program embraces all aspects of our patients’ lives that impact their health. The South Hill community is as excited as I am to welcome our residents and make sure they feel valued and at home for their time with us.

With dedicated faculty mentors, diverse clinical training and a focus on addressing health disparities, we are committed to preparing the next generation of physicians for successful and fulfilling careers in family medicine.

If you are ready to broaden your horizons, develop profound connections with the patients and communities you serve, and help create the next generation of family medicine training, you will be met with a team of family physicians and educators who are eager to work and learn alongside you.

Lori Landes, M.D., Ph.D.
Residency Program Director
VCU Health-Community Memorial Hospital Family Medicine Residency
Assistant Professor, Department of Family Medicine
VCU School of Medicine

Our residency was founded with a simple vision: Every person in every community deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest, happiest, longest life possible. We believe the best way to achieve this vision is to center our training within the communities that need us most. This new program is designed to train adaptable residents that come away from residency with a broad range of skills and the confidence to create a future practice that best meets the needs of their communities and themselves. Our robust curriculum prepares residents to meet these goals by providing training in diverse settings including rural, urban underserved, a community-based hospital, an academic medical center, and global health. 

Residents will spend their first year in the Richmond area, where they will rotate through a wide spectrum of inpatient and outpatient specialties to build a strong clinical foundation and gain experience at the regional referral center for the South Hill community.  Every week during PGY-1, residents will treat patients at the Hayes E. Willis Health Center, an urban underserved community clinic that cares for a diverse patient population. 

The second and third years of the program take place in South Hill, a burgeoning small town in rural Virginia about 80 miles southwest of Richmond. Residents will work alongside attendings and other health care professionals at VCU Health’s Community Memorial Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility built in 2018 to bring comprehensive and compassionate care to South Hill and the surrounding areas.

We believe we need family medicine and primary care involved at all levels of research and health policy change to improve health outcomes in the U.S. and to help define the future of primary care. In addition to faculty engaged in scholarship at the local, state national, and international levels, we host multiple research-focused groups including the Virginia Ambulatory Care Outcomes Research Network (ACORN) and the Center on Society and Health.

Our residency program provides training that exposes residents to the range of possibilities of family medicine scholarship and we develop a personalized resident scholarship plan that meets each residents’ scholarship career goals. Whether it be effectively using quality improvement (QI) to improve your clinical practice or pursuing a physician-scientist career, our program will provide training and family medicine mentorship to meet your goals.

Our scholarship curriculum is longitudinal across all three years of training and, in alignment with our mission, focuses on community engagement. We provide protected time for scholarship and support conference attendance for presenting scholarship work. Included in our scholarship curriculum is:

Erin Van Vleet
Residency Program Coordinator
Department of Family Medicine and Population Health
Box 980251
Richmond, VA 23298
804-628-1046
Erin.Vanvleet@vcuhealth.org