The new leadership at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital is already looking to the future and how the hospital is going to transition to a teaching hospital as well as the only patient care hospital in Western Nevada County. Dr. Scott Neeley has been at the helm for a little over a month and part of his mission is to bring a residency program to Sierra Nevada that will attract new family medical practitioners to the area. Dr. Neeley has been responsible for establishing a number of residency programs at his prior work in Stockton. He says the process for implementing a program has a number of phases, with the initial step finding a qualified partner institution.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education is responsible for setting and monitoring voluntary professional educational standards essential in preparing physicians to deliver safe, high-quality medical care to all Americans.

With applications complete and partnership in place, the hospital in now working on finalizing the curriculum and identifying where the residents will practice, so administration is looking to begin hosting residents in late June of 2023. Once on board, the doctors who have already completed medical school will work on specificity of family medical care.

With research showing that many doctors choose to practice in a location close to where they complete a residency, the goal is to have a feeder system of young practitioners to support the families in western Nevada County and surrounding areas.