Victoria Pelham

TDS

PALM SPRINGS – After years of work by the Coachella Valley's health care community, the physician office and future family medicine residency headquarters for the UC Riverside School of Medicine opened Wednesday in the Las Palmas medical plaza.

The two-story facility includes 20 exam rooms, a triage room, family counseling room, smart classroom and two procedure rooms that will be used for everything from giving injections to biopsies.

Seven certified physicians will begin treating patients there next month.

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"What this has done is really laid the foundation for us to be able to bring new physicians to our community that we desperately need," Desert Regional Medical Center CEO Carolyn Caldwell said.

She called the facility and program a game-changer for the Coachella Valley which has struggled with a severe physician shortage for decades.

While the federal recommendations are 1 doctor for every 2,000 residents, some parts of the eastern Coachella Valley have rates as low as 1 doctor per 9,000 residents.

The program, run by the new UC Riverside School of Medicine in partnership with Desert Regional in Palm Springs, will bring eight medical residents starting in July 2015 and eventually expand to 24 full-time residents.

It was funded through a $5 million, five-year grant from the Desert Healthcare District, and will continue through the foundation of Tenet Healthcare and revenue from its clinics.

Officials say they hope to train medical residents who will stay and practice in the Coachella Valley, since two of the biggest determinants of where a doctor will practice include where they come from and where they finish their training.

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"The unique function of the medical school is to actually improve the health of the community we serve," said Richard Olds, dean of the medical school. "It's not enough we just have doctors; we have to work with the community to actually improve health statistics in our area: combat childhood obesity, do a better job of treating diabetes… and hypertension.

"It's not us against some other health care system. It's us working with everyone here around a common goal."

Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage in June 2013 also launched a residency program with the same vision of training doctors who will stay in the Coachella Valley.

Its residents — 23 of them last year with another class of 22 starting this month — are training in family medicine, internal medicine or preliminary medicine. They have been seeing patients in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, family clinic in La Quinta, throughout the hospital and through medical volunteer work.

Residents in UC Riverside's program are anticipated to treat about 12,000 patients a year.

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The clinic will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, but officials eventually hope to accommodate more patients by adding lunch, evening and weekend hours.

About 14.1 percent of Coachella Valley adults, an estimated 49,890 people, cited health care provider hours of operation as a barrier to receiving health care, according to 2013 Health Assessment Resource Center data.

"This is a beginning," said Desert Healthcare District Board President Michael Solomon. "This is just a first step; there's a lot more to come."