Implementing a community outreach curriculum in a primary care residency: The creation of ICARE (Integrating Community Agencies in Residency Education) by the WSU School of Medicine’s Family Medicine program

Background There are thousands of healthcare sites in the United States that provide free medical care and are solely run on physician volunteerism. In parallel, physicians report increasing rates of burnout, just doing the jobs they’re paid for. Unfortunately, changes in federal funding, the demands of the healthcare workforce and the cost of medical education put some organizations at risk. Here we explore a method for exposing early-career physicians to community outreach during Family Medicine (FM) residency training as a means to fill gaps in care at the community level and reinvigorate the meaning they find in their profession through direct service. We specifically examined the coverage achieved and gauged the meaning that physician participants gleaned from the experience. Methods Across 2 years, residents in an FM program in the suburbs of Detroit participated in a mandatory community outreach curriculum. We drafted a curriculum that began with community partners we worked with previously and used those connections to expand to new organizations. We tracked the number of hours and community members served and residents participated in satisfaction surveys at the end of each year. Results Outreach sites provided a total of 888.5 hours of care with 2,734 community members served. Between Year 1 (Y1) and Year 2 (Y2) 5 new community partnerships emerged while 2 were lost due to leadership change. The majority of residents reported finding the curriculum meaningful (Y1 94%, Y2 80%), rewarding (Y1 88%, Y2 95%) and that they were satisfied with it (Y1 82%, Y2 75%). Conclusion The development of a community outreach curriculum can be sustainable in an FM residency program. Robust outcomes in terms of both time committed and number of community members served are possible within the constraints of residency education. Such a curriculum can be found to be professionally rewarding and personally meaningful by residents.