SLU family medicine program gets more space in south city clinic

Family medicine residents at St. Louis University will soon have an expanded clinic to treat patients in south St. Louis. Family Care Health Centers expects to open nine exam rooms and meeting space in a 2,450-square-foot expansion to its Carondelet facility, where residents will see patients on an outpatient basis during their three years of training.

Residency programs are the three years of specialty training after a doctor graduates from medical school. Fewer medical students are choosing general practice residency programs, in part because of lower salaries compared to specialties like orthopedic surgery or neurology.

The partnership with Family Care started in 2011 and has grown to 12 residents who work primarily at the Carondelet clinic and also rotate through local hospitals. The residents attended medical schools at SLU, Washington University, University of Missouri-Columbia, Harvard, Tulane and others across the country. Two of the programs goals are to encourage the new doctors to stay in the state and in underserved communities, and the four first-year residents all attended medical schools in Missouri. The residents are employees of SLU, and the $1.3 million building expansion was funded through the health centers reserves.

Weve found that our current facility is just cramped with our current services, so the board voted earlier this year to add on with the main purpose of allowing residents to have their own space, said Dr. Robert Massie, CEO of Family Care Health Center. Weve been really impressed with the quality of the residents.

The 33,000-square-foot Carondelet clinic opened in 2003 and provides primary care, dental, vision, mental health, nutrition and lab services. There are 20 doctors, four nurse practitioners and three mental health professionals on the staff at Carondelet and a second location in the Grove neighborhood.

Family Care Health Centers are federally qualified, meaning they receive funding through government insurance programs and grants. The centers focus on primary care and refer many patients to ConnectCare, a specialty services and urgent care facility on Delmar Boulevard that is slated to close later this month. Staff at Family Care are scrambling to send patients to other specialists at local hospitals and said the waits to see a doctor will get longer.

The closure of ConnectCare, linked to federal budget cuts and the state Legislatures refusal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, signals a crisis in health care funding, analysts have said. The budget at Family Care is stable but looking very flat at best, Massie said. Family Care does expect to hire one obstetrician/gynecologist in the next year to meet a higher demand for prenatal care in the region.

Missouri will need 687 more primary care physicians and Illinois will need 1,063 by 2030 to maintain the level of care currently available, according to a new report from the Robert Graham Center, a Washington-based think tank on primary care policy and research. The additional doctors are expected to be needed for population growth and aging as well as an increase in insured patients under the Affordable Care Act.

Dr. Christine Jacobs, director of the SLU family medicine residency program, said the expansion of the Carondelet clinic will be attractive to potential doctors-in-training.

It will be great when well have more space available, well be easily able to serve more clients, Jacobs said. Most new patients were accepting are through the residency program.