Riverside Community Hospital Receives Accreditation for Internal Medicine Residency Program

Riverside Community Hospital has received accreditation to sponsor an internal medicine residency training program, which has been developed in coordination with the University of California, Riverside’s School of Medicine, UCR announced this weekend.

RCH will serve as an inpatient training facility, with additional training at Riverside Medical Clinic and other specialty sites.

The hospital will have its first class of internal medicine residents beginning in July 2016, according to a UCR press release.

Accreditation was awarded by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which accredits graduate medical education programs in the United States.

“RCH is pleased to offer Riverside’s newest residency program with the UC Riverside School of Medicine,” said Patrick Brilliant, president and CEO of Riverside Community Hospital. “Our internal medicine program, together with the next programs being developed, will attract the next generation of physicians into our medical community.”

Medical school seniors will be interviewed for positions in the Internal Medicine Residency Program and some faculty from the UCR School of Medicine will serve as educators for the program.

“The approval of the RCH residency program helps reinforce the medical school’s mission to expand and diversify the physician workforce in Inland Southern California,” said Neil Schiller, Ph.D, interim dean of the UCR School of Medicine. Schiller said that there is a “severe shortage of physicians” in the region.

“By building new residency training programs in our area, over time we will begin to reverse that shortage. That is because one of the primary drivers of where physicians practice is where they complete residency training.”

The internal medicine program will have 55 residents by 2018, according to the release.

--City News Service, photo courtesy of the Riverside Community Hospital