Cheshire Medical Center said its Family Medicine Residency program expects 22,000 patients next fiscal year. That’s a 67 percent increase from 2024, when the program launched.
The rapid growth in patients points to an improved capacity for a region plagued by shortages and backlogs in primary care coverage.
The Health Resources and Services Administration designates Cheshire County as part of a Health Professional Shortage Area that includes Cheshire, Hillsborough, Merrimack, and Sullivan counties. The federal agency defines primary care need as one physician for 3,500 people. Health Professional Shortage Areas fall below this benchmark.
Last year, The Sentinel reported patients of Cheshire Medical residents included people who had not seen a doctor in over a decade.
Working in tandem with its parent Dartmouth Health, Cheshire Medical is home to 17 doctors in residence, the majority of whom provide primary care. These residents were recruited to complete their three-year rotations in the Monadnock Region. The hope of Program Director Dr. Karl Dietrich is that they will choose to stay and practice medicine here.
“The long-term goal of the program is really to increase the number of primary care family physicians in our area,” Dietrich said. “That is not an overnight thing, and it’s not something that happens with a single graduating class, but that’s our long-term goal when we look over the next couple of years.”
So far, Cheshire Medical Center residents had treated over 40,000 patients as of this week, according to data provided by the hospital.
Though it is too early to tell if newly arrived providers will put down roots in Cheshire County — the first class of residents is expected to graduate in 2027 — Dietrich said the program has seen a steady improvement in candidate quality and has retained all faculty up to this academic year.
Dietrich said the residency has gone from a fresh-faced program to a recognized and talked-about opportunity for medical students at a physician recruiting conference he attends in the Midwest.
“It was so cool to go this year and see the benefits of no longer being brand new kind of starting to develop what I think is a really positive reputation in our region.”
Available data suggest odds are high that at least some of Cheshire Medical’s residents will remain close by. A March report from the American Board of Family Medicine found that in 2024, 62 percent of physicians who graduated between 2007 and 2018 practiced medicine in the states where they completed their residency.
First-year resident Dr. Bradley Firchow, said he was drawn to the Keene hospital thanks in part to its affiliation with Dartmouth Health and the wide breadth of rural healthcare research opportunities it provides provides.
As an Appalachia native, Firchow has watched the ramifications of chronic disinvestment in rural hospitals play out close to home. In his time studying medicine, he said he has observed a national healthcare system, best fit for large urban centers but designed with little thought for communities like his.
Firchow said health centers and hospitals nationwide receive government reimbursements but that these payouts are largely tied to patient volume and the types of services they provide. The result is a chronic underfunding or rural health systems, which he said see a lower number of patients and may not have access to the same state-of-the-art technology compared to their big-city counterparts.
“We have to think about ways in the United States that we can restructure our health systems to not penalize rural communities for not having the same assets that you might expect in a city,” Firchow said.
These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. Don’t just read this. Share it with one person who doesn’t usually follow local news — that’s how we make an impact. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.