• Virginia Mason Residency Learning
  

“We create tailored experiences to develop exceptional physicians, fulfilled individuals, and innovative leaders.”

The Internal Medicine Residency Program at Virginia Mason offers an academically rigorous education in a nationally recognized community hospital. Our residency combines team-based learning with one-to-one mentorship activities and allows residents the flexibility to pursue their individual interests.

Message from the Program Director

Seattle, 1920. A small group of doctors decided to form a hospital where teamwork would be celebrated. They named the hospital after their daughters and worked with purpose to grow large enough for the residency program to flourish. Long before patient safety was recognized as a concept, they published a paper dedicated to the evaluation of medical errors with the intent of learning from mistakes and improving. While Virginia Mason and its residency programs grew, so did the culture around ideas. While most hospitals continue to be run from the top down, in the 1950s Virginia Mason took an innovate approach, encouraging and rewarding anyone, in any position, who brought forward good ideas. This empowered the voices of women and people of color within the organization and it became the foundation of the culture we continue to embrace and promote today: Respect for people, ALL people, no matter which side of the stethoscope they stand on.

Seattle, 2020. Teamwork and innovation remain core ideals. We watched closely as news coverage chronicled the rapid spread of coronavirus overseas, and then we learned the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States had been identified in our neighboring city of Kirkland. Within days, Virginia Mason mobilized resources, building dedicated hospital units to test and treat COVID-19 patients. We continue to refine our response as new data emerge and community needs evolve. With strong resident leadership, we made rapid adjustments to both clinical practice and resident education, including telemedicine, study-at-home, and continued robust didactics via a virtual platform. This allowed us to ensure the safety, engagement, connection and development of our residents.

While answering the once-in-a-lifetime call to respond to a global pandemic, we recognized the hardships were not shared equally, as BIPOC suffered the greatest losses of life, health, and economic stability. We saw George Floyd murdered. The outrage over police brutality and the systemic racism that has created a public health crisis, brought thousands of physicians and health care workers into the streets of Seattle in protest. We stepped out with them, knowing that our prior year’s work restructuring our recruitment process to address the inequity imbedded in application review was just the beginning of the beginning of the work we need to do to dismantle systemic racism in healthcare and to create reparative health justice.

Virginia Mason has been serving the communities of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest for more than 100 years. Our residency program remains a vital part of the Virginia Mason story. Becoming an internal medicine resident at Virginia Mason means more than taking part in our story. It is the opportunity help shape and write the story of our next 100 years.

Here’s what matching at Virginia Mason could mean for you:

• Train with an organization that is an international leader in patient safety and quality improvement.
• Experience the support and warmth of a community program while having access to:
    
  
  • The rigor of an intensive, closed CCU experience.
  • The scholarship of research promoted by our Benaroya Research Institute (BRI) and our specialists who are continually, actively engaged in clinical studies.
  • A tertiary referral center experience — caring for a diverse, medically-complex population who come from a wide referral net to access our expertise in areas like complex pancreaticobiliary interventions, hyperbaric treatments, transplant, stroke, cancer and acute cardiac care.
  • Work in action — on issues of institutional racism, health care disparities and inequity.
  • Leadership development — our Leadership in Quality Improvement (LQI) Pathway lets you dive as deeply as you want into understanding how the Virginia Mason Production System (VMPS) improves health care delivery.
  • Tailoring your experience — whether your career goal is primary care, hospital medicine or fellowship.
  • Enhancing your education — participate in medical student teaching, learn self-care skills, get into the friendly competition of our resident-developed Wards Tournament.

Becoming immersed in world-class patient care is an amazing way to receive your training. I hope you consider becoming a part of our story and shape the next 100 years to come!

Looking forward,

Brandee Grooms, MD, FACP

Message from the Internal Medicine Chief Residents

We are proud to serve as the Chief Medical Residents for 2021-2022 and want to share with you what makes Virginia Mason such an incredible and unique place to train. At every opportunity, our program strives to realize its mission of creating tailored experiences to develop exceptional physicians, fulfilled individuals and innovative leaders. We would like to highlight a few of the ways in which we do this.

Exceptional Physicians
Virginia Mason cultivates the collegial atmosphere of a community program while offering amazing academic opportunities. Virginia Mason is a tertiary referral center for patients in the greater northwest region, including Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. It is a comprehensive stroke center and home to the GI Centers of Excellence. Our residents work in multiple outpatient practice settings through Virginia Mason’s regional clinics and through our partnerships with organizations including King County Public Health and Providence Health and Services. As a result, our residents are privileged to care for a wide range of medically and socio-economically diverse patients.

Our residents develop close relationships with each other and with faculty. They connect with mentors committed to their success in all areas of medicine, including primary care, hospital medicine and subspecialties.

Fulfilled Individuals
The training at Virginia Mason goes beyond learning the technical aspects of medicine. We strive to develop our residents as whole individuals with focused teaching on a growth mindset, the science of habit formation, understanding cognitive biases, stress-reduction techniques and developing personal mission statements. As a small and agile program, we are proud to maintain an ongoing dialogue about how we can sustainably grow into our best selves. We are also protective of time away from the hospital and believe part of the residency experience should include time with loved ones, quality sleep, and cultivating a life outside of the hospital. There is time to enjoy and explore the Pacific Northwest, whose beauty is unmatched.

Innovative Leaders
We believe in training residents for their roles as physician leaders. Whether it be through the Leadership in Quality Improvement Pathway, engagement in medical education, or involvement in one of the many resident committees, residents are presented with opportunities to grow as leaders in their areas of interest. Because our program exists within Virginia Mason, residents become knowledgeable of the internationally-acclaimed Virginia Mason Production System (VMPS), a Lean-based methodology utilized by the entire organization to drive innovation, reduce waste, and achieve our goal of being the quality leader in health care.

We are honored by your interest in the Virginia Mason Internal Medicine Residency program and we look forward to meeting you!

Warmly,
 
Cheyenne Enevold, MD, and Danielle Hanssen, DO