Penn Medicine hired 43 physicians-in-training displaced from Crozer’s shut-down, including the entire family medicine group

The University of Pennsylvania Health System was already gearing up to start recruiting family medicine resident physicians at Chester County Hospital.

It is speeding up the program’s creation by a year to make a new home for the 26 family medicine residents who were displaced by the shutdown of bankrupt Crozer Health this month.

“It’s a lot of work to do it so quickly, but we‘re pretty nimble,” said Karen Pinsky, a pediatrician who was recently appointed president of the West Chester hospital that Penn owns.

Penn’s goal is to increase the supply of primary care doctors in the communities served by Chester County Hospital, where the trainees will gain experience working with hospitalized patients.

But adopting Crozer’s program also prevented care gaps in parts of Delaware County. Crozer’s residents provided much of the care at the Springfield Center for Family Health and at ChesPenn’s Center for Family Health at Upper Darby.

The ChesPenn site, which is a federally qualified health clinic, treats 9,000 mostly lower-income patients a year, while the Springfield location has 15,000 patients annually, Penn said.

Penn is hiring all 12 of the Crozer family medicine physicians at Springfield effective May 19.

» READ MORE: Health system bankruptcy leaves Crozer patients in limbo

Penn also took on three sports medicine fellows at Chester County Hospital, and 10 internal medicine residents and four OB/GYN residents at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Hospital.

The 26 family medicine residents, plus nine who will start this summer, will work in Delaware County.

Other systems also picked up Crozer residents.

Main Line Health assumed Crozer’s entire psychiatry residency. That included 13 current residents and four starting in July. Main Line also hired 10 internal medicine residents, including two who start in July. The system also took on one OB/GYN resident (it is also in the process of hiring seven of Crozer’s 10 OB/GYNs).

Jefferson Health took 10 emergency medicine trainees, and an assortment of others for a total of 20 residents.

Temple Health took five, ChristianaCare two, and Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic one.

Crozer Health officials did not respond to requests last month for the total number of medical trainees who were being displaced by the system’s closure.

The online directory of the American Council of Graduate Medical Education showed that Crozer had 112 residents in seven programs.

Penn is only changing the site of inpatient training, which had to happen because of Crozer’s closure. It could not immediately change the outpatient sites, nor the program director, Bill Warning, who is becoming a Penn employee.

Otherwise, “we really would have to get approval as a new program,” said Ilene Rosen, Penn’s associate dean for graduate medical education.

Penn officials said they also wanted to maintain access to care for the residents of Delaware County, who depend on the locations in Springfield and Upper Darby.

“We‘re not going to just hire them and then put them out in Radnor, on the Main Line,” said Richard Wender, Penn’s chair of family medicine.

While the transfer of an entire program had to be carefully choreographed, the movement of individual residents was more of a free-for-all.

The residents cut loose by their hospital‘s closing are free to reach out to other institutions to find a new spot. Residency program directors typically play a key role in placing their trainees in new programs.

Some residents who expected to graduate from Crozer at the end of June faced the particular challenge of needing to find a place to complete the final two months of training.

Some Crozer emergency medicine residents received a waiver that means they don’t have to transfer. But family medicine residents had no such luck, Rosen said. That means third-year residents in that program are going to have to finish at Chester County Hospital, Rosen said.

Kevin Mahoney, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, has pushed for the creation of a family medicine program in Chester County for at least the last five years, Wender said.

When Wender was hired in August 2020, he told Mahoney that it’s a long-term commitment, starting with recruiting residents who take three years to complete the program.

“Not all of them are going to stay in that community. But over the long run, you open up the faucet of candidates who, over time, will populate primary care around that hospital,” he said.

Wender said the Penn health system has a good example of how that can work in Lancaster County. Lancaster General Hospital, which Penn acquired in 2015, has had a family medicine residency program for 50 years.

“If you look at the supply of family physicians all around the Lancaster community, it’s way more than what you would see in that typical, similar geographic area. And it’s because they have strong family medicine residency,” Wender said.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect the placement of two transitional year residents at unspecified systems.