Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship

On Friday, June 14, CMU Medical Education Partners hosted a graduation ceremony for 41 physicians who completed their residency and fellowship programs.  Most of these learners started this phase of their training in the middle of a pandemic, facing rapid and unprecedented changes in the health care system.  This class showed tremendous capability and adaptability as they learned to trust themselves and their colleagues to care for patients during a global medical crisis.

The CMU College of Medicine and CMU Medical Education Partners strive to provide doctors for our region and throughout our state.  Twelve percent of these graduates will continue their work in Saginaw and 32% will remain in Michigan.  Just over 30% of this class will be continuing their training in fellowship programs.  Of the students headed into practice, nearly 40% will be caring for patients in designated health professional shortage areas.  By providing medical care for our rural and underserved populations, our graduates advance our mission and have a positive impact on overall health outcomes.

This year’s graduation ceremony also marked a significant milestone for graduate medical education (GME) in our region with the graduation of our 1,000^th resident.  The first residency program in Saginaw began in 1947, providing clinical obstetrics training to physicians just out of medical school.  In 1950, an Internal Medicine residency program began.  Then, in 1968, the area’s three major hospitals collaborated to form Saginaw Cooperative Hospitals, a separate organization to oversee all GME programming in the city.  At that same time, they established a general surgery residency program and one of the first family medicine residency programs in the country.

Over the last five decades, GME programming has grown and expanded to meet the needs of our region.  As CMU Medical Education Partners, our GME programming now consists of eight accredited residency programs including emergency medicine, family medicine, general surgery, internal medicine, ob/gyn, pediatrics, psychiatry and podiatry as well as a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship.  Currently, more than 170 residents are in training and each year there is more demand for capacity.  Our GME programs accepted 54 residents in 2023, which was the largest class in our history at the time.  This was surpassed in 2024, when 58 residents matched into these programs.