NYC Family Medicine Residency Closes Permanently

Despite exhaustive negotiations by multiple stakeholders, the New York Medical College Brooklyn-Queens Family Medicine Residency Program has closed permanently, retroactive to Feb. 28. That news came earlier this month, after a proposed new sponsoring hospital and the New York State Department of Health, or DOH, failed to reach agreement on funding to cover the costs of operating the program at the projected new site.

The recent action leaves the city's public health care system, which is overseen by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., with no family medicine residency among its 11 acute-care hospitals, according to Montgomery Douglas, M.D., former director of the Brooklyn-Queens residency.

Douglas told AAFP News Now that the Queens Hospital Center, or QHC, in Jamaica, N.Y., which had shown an interest in taking over the residency, wanted the state DOH to contribute as much as $5.5 million during the next three years to supplement graduate medical education monies from federal sources. State officials failed to respond to that request, and the decision to close the program became unavoidable.

Meanwhile, the residency's original sponsoring institution, Mary Immaculate Hospital, officially closed on Feb. 28, along with St. John's Queens Hospital. Both hospitals had been operated by Caritas Health Care Inc., which went bankrupt in February.

Douglas said that although he has no expectation that the Brooklyn-Queens residency will be re-established, there still may be a chance that a new family medicine residency could be opened at the QHC.

"My sense is that neither the state DOH nor the QHC actually said no (to this residency). There's an opportunity, a possibility, of setting up a family medicine residency in the future," he said.

At press time, all but two of the Brooklyn-Queens program's 21 residents had begun training at other family medicine programs. Douglas is now full-time chair of the New York Medical College Department of Family and Community Medicine, and several other faculty members have found new positions.