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Residents and faculty sitting on the wooden front steps of a house at the class of 2025 intern retreat

Valley Family Medicine · Program

Program Information

Valley Family Medicine Residency Program is a community-based graduate medical education training program that is fully accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).

We proudly serve and learn in South King County, Washington, a highly economically and culturally diverse community. We are committed to the development of highly qualified family physicians who train to practice medicine in the community of their choice.

Our sponsoring institution is Valley Medical Center, the largest and most comprehensive medical complex in South King County, Washington, with a medical staff that represents virtually every clinical specialty and subspecialty in medicine.

We are a member of the WWAMI Region Family Medicine Residency Network (FMRN), a group of 32 core family medicine residency programs across Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. As members, we benefit from collaboration, collective education, and robust access to shared resources across the region.

Valley Family Medicine

Program highlights

  • Clinic First

    The clinic experience is the heart of VFM. We provide outstanding education through an ambulatory, team-focused, and longitudinal training experience. Introduced in 1998, Clinic First is an innovative concept designed to maximize continuity of care between residents and their clinic patients. The benefits of the Clinic First approach are proven by data which show that increased patient continuity improves quality of care.

  • Community Diversity

    VFM is located in South King County, Washington – one of the most culturally diverse communities in the country. There are more than 100 different languages spoken in the surrounding school systems. Most of VFM’s clinic population is underserved, including a large number of geriatric, obstetric, and pediatric patients.

  • Obstetrics

    Valley Medical Center has more than 3,000 deliveries a year. Our program prepares residents for full-spectrum obstetric care for practice in urban or rural settings. Most residents graduate with more than 100 non-operative deliveries. Additionally, there are ample C-section opportunities for those who wish to pursue.

  • Resident Well-Being

    We value physician well-being and have a robust wellness culture that is integrated into all aspects of our resident training. We continuously incorporate resident input in ways to alleviate stressors and enhance wellness with education, tools, and dedicated time for rest and wellness activities.

  • Scholarship

    The program supports a culture of scholarship with opportunities for local and regional presentations and peer-reviewed publications in nationally recognized journals.

Our commitment

Anti-racism Vision Statement

We the faculty and residents of the Valley Family Medicine Residency Program recognize the deep impacts of systemic racism and oppression on the health and wellbeing of our community.

We pledge to engage in interpersonal work to hold ourselves and each other accountable as we strive toward becoming an anti-racist organization.

We commit to dismantling all forms of structural oppression through continued learning, thoughtful patient care, systems improvement, and advocacy.

We believe that our medical team should reflect and support the diversity of the population we serve, and we seek to break down barriers for those historically excluded from medical training.

From the Director

Letter from the Program Director

Dear Prospective Applicant:

Thank you for considering our program for your residency training.

Valley Family Medicine Residency is a fully ACGME accredited training program located at Valley Medical Center in Renton, WA, just south of the city of Seattle. The goal of the program is to train graduates to practice full spectrum family medicine in a variety of clinical settings, from urban to rural. We do this with a curriculum emphasizing obstetrics, doctor-patient communication, and evidence-based medicine, taught by our skilled and dedicated faculty. Our innovative program is designed to foster collegiality, offer the flexibility to pursue special interests, promote participatory decision-making, and support balance between residents’ personal and professional lives.

We are proud of the clinical experience and training we provide our current residents. For years, our graduates have maintained a 100% pass rate for the ABFM Certification Exam and recent graduates are practicing in a wide variety of clinical settings, leadership positions, and academic roles across the Northwest, the US, and internationally.

We provide comprehensive healthcare to a community rich in socioeconomic and ethnic diversity, with over 180 languages spoken in our local school system. Our training site is the Valley Medical Center campus, the largest medical center in South King County. The medical center supports a busy emergency department, medicine and pediatric floors, ICU/CCU/NICU units, and delivers approximately 3,000 babies per year through the Birth Center. Valley Family Medicine Clinic, our outpatient residency clinic, is located on the hospital campus, creating the perfect learning environment for our “Clinic First” curricular strategy.

The residency also hosts high-risk obstetrics, procedures, psychiatry, counseling, integrative medicine, pediatric, travel health, and osteopathic manual manipulation “specialty” clinics, allowing our residents to participate in these experiences as part of their core outpatient training. We also offer medical abortion, management of substance use disorder including Suboxone therapy, and gender affirming care.

Regardless of your desire for city life or suburban living, the location of our program is ideal. The city of Seattle is a vibrant cultural community, with diverse and colorful neighborhoods renowned for their year-long culinary, artistic, and literary events and resources. Outside the city, the rich natural landscape of the Puget Sound region offers unparalleled recreational opportunities, such as hiking, skiing, boating, fishing, and mountain biking, to name a few.

We are committed to providing you with the opportunity to practice quality family medicine in a supportive and stimulating environment. It is my hope that as you learn more about what we offer, you will find our program an excellent choice for your future.

Sincerely,

Sarah Maitre, M.D.Program Director