The Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency, a 5-5-5 program, offers an opportunity to draw from the best of two training environments in Winchester and Front Royal, Virginia. The Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency Program has been accredited by the AOA as a full 3-year Family Practice Residency with Bret Ripley, DO as the Osteopathic Director.

Winchester and its suburbs, with its population of 91,000, is as quaint and bucolic as one would expect of a town that has been around since Colonial days and was inked onto a map in 1748 by a young surveyor named George Washington. Winchester is, however, also home to newly built state-of-the-art regional hospital, the Winchester Medical Center. This 408-bed referral hospital draws a very diverse population of patients from four states—Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. This is where residents spend most of their first year working side by side with highly respected board-certified specialists and family physicians.

Residents spend most of their last two years in the 18,000 square foot Front Royal Family Practice Center (a 25-minute drive from Winchester), with their hospital responsibilities primarily in the adjacent Warren Memorial Hospital. The Center is a state-of-the-art ambulatory care center. Warren Memorial Hospital is a fully renovated, 131-bed community hospital including an attached long-term care facility. This small town hospital plays a vital role in meeting the medical needs of Front Royal (population 12,500) and the surrounding rural areas. Front Royal is the northern gateway to the beautiful Skyline Drive which transverses the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah National Park.

The program has an emphasis on training physicians for Virginia's rural areas and small towns, which have such a great need for family physicians. Fluency in Spanish is very valuable on some rotations.

We recognize that skills in ambulatory medicine are crucial to being a good family physician. In the second and third year, residents spend three to five half days in the Front Royal Family Practice Center seeing a growing panel of their own patients. In addition, one ambulatory medicine session per week in your third year is spent in local community health centers or private practice offices.

All family physician faculty are board-certified with extensive cumulative clinical experience. Most have participated in faculty development fellowships. We also have, on site, a nurse practitioner, clinical pharmacist and a behavioral health specialist. There are approximately 30,000 annual patient visits to the Center from a very socioeconomically diverse small town and rural population.

The family practice faculty and residents see patients in the Family Practice Center, as well as in the teaching nursing home, patients' homes, an adolescent medicine school clinic, three rural public health clinics, a migrant clinic, a free clinic and the local jail.

Several exciting changes have taken place at the Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency including implementation of a state-of-the-art Electronic Medical Record in 2002 and an American Osteopathic Association approved three-year Family Practice training program in November 2005. The Electronic Medical Record has helped to enhance the resident educational experience by providing real-time feedback on patient encounters and by providing a database by which clinical outcomes of patient encounters can be assessed. The AOA approved residency will allow Osteopathic Physicians to continue their Osteopathic training as well as allowing them a broader range of practice opportunities upon graduation from residency.

Graduates of the Shenandoah Valley Family Practice Residency Program are fully prepared to enter the next phase of their professional career, establishing their own or joining an existing practice. They are especially well trained for small town and rural practice but can easily adapt to suburban practice. For those who elect to remain in the area, the opportunities to practice their broad skills are plentiful.