Butler Hospital residency program gets green light to start July 2025
After over three years of preparation, Butler Memorial Hospital’s Butler Family Medicine Residency Program has the green light to begin its first year of class in July 2025.
The program, part of Independence Health System, received its long-awaited accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, an independent, not-for-profit organization which oversees the accreditation of residency and fellowship programs in the United States.
The Butler Family Medicine residency is a three-year program in which residents will be trained in numerous specialties, including family medicine, obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics, cardiology, and intensive care, among others. The program will accept eight students in each of its first three years until it builds up to a full class of 24 by its third year.
The program, which is being directed by Dr. Joe Dougherty, has been in the works since 2021.
“Right now, we're in the process of interviewing medical students and formulating our first class,” said Dr. Michael Fiorina, chief medical officer at Butler Memorial Hospital.
Initially, there were hopes of starting the first year of classes in July 2024, but those hopes were dashed due to delays in receiving accreditation.
Throughout the program, residents will rotate between three different sites, Butler Memorial Hospital, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the Butler Family Medicine Primary Care facility on Woody Drive in Butler.
In addition, the residents will participate in various community programs, “fostering a well-rounded educational experience,” according to officials. Those completing the program will be fully licensed.
At one stage, there were tentative plans to use the vacant former Butler Middle School building on East North Street for the program. However, those plans fell through.
The upcoming residency program is not the first for a hospital within the Independence Health System, which was formed at the start of 2023 with the merger between Butler Health System and Excela Health. Both Clarion Hospital and Latrobe Hospital have similar family medicine residency programs.
However, Fiorina says that the new residency program at Butler couldn’t come soon enough, as Pennsylvania — and the U.S. as a whole — is facing a shortage of trained physicians.
“If you look at the statistics, by 2036, there’s going to be a shortage of 68,000 family practice physicians in the U.S.,” Fiorina said. “In this state, we are currently about 5,000 family practice doctors short of where we should be.”
Fiorina says that the shortage may hit Butler Memorial Hospital especially hard.
“We did a study here in Butler,” Fiorina said. “About 68% of our family practice physicians that are on staff at Butler Hospital are going to be over the age of 60 in the next five years. That's kind of scary. How many of us are going to be retiring in the next 5 to 10 years? So there is a huge need for family practice physicians.”
