Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital welcomes new class of family medicine residents

Dr. Alysia Swint wasn’t the least bit familiar with Santa Rosa when she began her family medicine residency this month at Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital.

“It was a very random finding,” said Swint, an Ohio native interested in integrative health, which focuses on preventing and managing chronic diseases. “My integrative health mentor at my school in Washington, D.C., actually knew someone at this program in Santa Rosa.”

The question is, will Swint, a graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, stay in Sonoma County after completing her three-year residency?

That remains to be seen, but it’s Sutter’s hope that Swint and her 11 cohorts in the class of 2026 will choose to practice in the area after they graduate.

That would help put a local dent into a longstanding national shortage of family medicine physicians, expected to be short 53,000 by 2025, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians.

To reverse that trend, the Washington, D.C.-based physicians’ advocacy group with nearly 130,000 members has formed a collaborative with seven other national and international family medicine organizations on an initiative called “America Needs More Family Doctors: 25 x 2030.” The goal is to ensure that by 2030, 25% of the country’s medical students choose family medicine as their specialty.

For its part, Sacramento-based Sutter Health is further growing its family medicine residency programs not only in Santa Rosa, but also at Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento, and at Sutter Amador Hospital, located about 45 miles from Sacramento, according to Leon Clark, vice president, chief research and health equity officer at Sutter Health.

The nonprofit health care system that operates more than 20 hospitals across Northern California also offers graduate medical education programs in other specialties at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, including emergency medicine, internal medicine, ophthalmology, psychiatry and surgery, according to Sutter.

Dr. Tara Scott, director of Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital’s Family Medicine Residency Program, said that of the 12 residents who graduated this year, only two are staying put in Sonoma County. The others are either moving to the Greater Bay Area or returning to their home states.

Scott would have liked more of them to call Sonoma County home. Of greater importance, she said, is to train as many family medicine doctors as possible who are focused on caring for marginalized communities: non-English-speaking, low income, uninsured and incarcerated people.

Of the 700-plus applications Sutter received for the newly started residency, 12 were chosen, said Scott, who has overseen the program since 2017. Sutter’s family medicine residency program began in 1995.

“We’re looking specifically for people who have demonstrated in their prior work, or in their essay through their life story, that they're already showing interest in working with the populations that we work with,” Scott said. “We want people who are here expressly to do this work instead of people who are sort of accepting all of the barriers and kind of putting up with it, if you will.”

In addition to its family medicine residency program, Sutter Santa Rosa offers an integrative health fellowship program. For Swint, that was a big selling point because the family medicine residency gives her access to those learnings, too, she said.

Since 2007, Sutter Santa Rosa’s family medicine program has partnered with Santa Rosa Community Health Centers, where residents practice and receive most of their outpatient training experience. Most applicants for Sutter Santa Rosa’s program are not from the area, Scott noted.

“I have to say, it's one every five or 10 years who is from the county,” she said. But when it does happen, it’s a dream for Scott. It means the resident wants to come home and stay.

Lightning struck this year when Graton native Dr. Faith Deis joined the class of 2026.

Deis recently moved back to Sonoma County after earning her medical degree from the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine at Washington State University. She attended Harvard University for her undergraduate work.

“When I was trying to think about what type of doctor I wanted to be and where I wanted to be a doctor, it was a really easy decision for me,” said Deis.

Her decision boiled down to wanting to support the community that cared for her growing up.

“I think that doing your residency training where you are going to be an attending physician is always beneficial,” she said, “because you get to … figure out the medical system and meet the patients you want to take care of when you are an independent practicing physician.”

Cheryl Sarfaty covers tourism, hospitality, health care and employment. Reach her at cheryl.sarfaty@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4259.