OVERVIEW

Rural Health

Cascades East Family Medicine Residency Program and the OHSU Department of Family Medicine are committed to producing family medicine physicians for rural Oregon. Greater than 80% of our graduates are practicing in communities with populations of 10,000 or less.

Oregon encompasses 97,000 square miles and has a population of 2.9 million. While over 70 percent of these people live in a narrow strip in the western part of the state, the remaining 30 percent live in rural, often very remote areas with limited access to medical care. Klamath Falls is culturally and economically linked to these small rural communities in Oregon.

In addition, the residency program has established close ties with two of these small communities: Burns and Reedsport. Our residents spend a six week required rotation in one of those communities so that they can gain experience in working side-by-side with successful, confident role models in rural health care delivery.