Class is in session at Butler Hospital residency program
After years of planning and waiting for official accreditation, Butler Memorial Hospital finally welcomed its first class of residents to its three-year family medicine residency program in late June.
The program officially began earlier this month on July 1 after a weeklong orientation. It was given the green light to start this year after the hospital received approval from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, an independent, not-for-profit organization that oversees the accreditation of residency and fellowship programs.
The program was initially to begin in July 2023, then July 2024, but was pushed back due to delays in receiving accreditation.
The inaugural class consists of four residents who were chosen from a pool of applicants on March 21, during the annual National Resident Matching Day. The residents are Rachel Cataldo from the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine, Lauren Duttry from the Liberty University College of Osteopathic Medicine, Gerald “Jerry” Eddis from American University of the Caribbean and Amba Pasupuleti from MNR Medical College in India.
The class will accept an additional four residents next year and will start accepting eight new residents for each year thereafter.
“We’re starting off small, in order to get the hospital used to having residents,” said program director Dr. Joe Dougherty. “The benefit with starting with four instead of eight was really just to get the hospital used to having them around and see how things work before we bring in that first full class of eight.”
Under the “matching” process, fourth-year medical students apply to a number of programs and rank the programs they’ve applied to by preference. Each program chooses which students it wants to interview and then the National Resident Matching Program works to connect them.
Dougherty said that the four who were chosen — and dozens of others who weren’t — put Butler Memorial at or near the top of their priority lists even though it was in the first year of its program.
“We had about a hundred applicants. We decided to interview about 22 of them and then, through the match process, we ended up with four,” Dougherty said. “The four have overwhelmingly said that our clinic-first model is what led them to apply here and ultimately decide to rank us highly.”
“I have always wanted to train in a residency program that matches my medical school experience in terms of patient demographics and location,” said Paspuleti on his profile on the Independence Health website. “The Butler Family Medicine Residency Program, an unopposed program with strong rural medicine exposure and close to a big city like Pittsburgh, is thus a perfect fit for me.”
“I chose the Butler Family Medicine Residency after falling in love with the region's scenic beauty and connecting with the passionate team behind the program,” Cataldo said on her profile. “Their enthusiasm for the innovative curriculum, dedication to excellent community-based care and excitement about building something new was inspiring.”
According to Dougherty, the residency program was created to address a pressing need for primary care physicians in Butler County.
“A hospital study discovered that by 2030, about half of all primary care physicians in Butler County would be of retirement age,” Dougherty said. “So they wanted to start a residency program to build that future workforce so there doesn’t become a shortage of primary care physicians in Butler County.”
The residency program itself is focused on the specialty of “family medicine,” with the residents rotating between the hospital itself and the Primary Care facility on Woody Drive. During their second year, they will also spend time at UPMC Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh.
“Family medicine is a specialty in which we’re able to take care of people from pregnancy, through childbirth, all the way up through death,” Dougherty said. “The primary focus of the specialty is taking care of not only the patient, but the family as well. As we like to say, we take care ‘from womb to tomb.’”
