MercyOne Des Moines Family Medicine Residency Program

Our mission is to prepare highly capable, compassionate family physicians through rigorous, comprehensive education, meaningful graduated responsibility, and a supportive learning community. Our graduates are equipped to provide excellent, patient-centered care and confidently serve the needs of any community they choose. 

Established in 1997, the MercyOne Des Moines/Primary Health Care Consortium Family Medicine Residency combines the close relationships and individualized support of a community-based program with the clinical breadth, complexity and resources of a large tertiary medical center. 

Our goal is straightforward: residents leave our program as highly capable family physicians, prepared to practice in any setting and care for the needs of any community they choose to serve.

Residents train across the full scope of family medicine, with broad experience in ambulatory care, adult inpatient medicine, obstetrics and women’s health, pediatrics, emergency and urgent care, geriatrics, procedures, and point-of-care ultrasound. They complete subspecialty rotations directly with subspecialists and continue learning from those physicians through consultation and collaboration on the inpatient medicine service. 

Pediatrics is an especially strong and longitudinal component of the curriculum. Residents complete 10 weeks of inpatient pediatrics distributed across all three years of training. This is supplemented by pediatric emergency medicine, newborn care, a dedicated newborn resuscitation experience for residents pursuing enhanced obstetric training, outpatient pediatrics, pediatric specialty opportunities, and a substantial pediatric population in continuity clinic. 

Residents are given meaningful responsibility from the beginning of training. Through true graduated autonomy, they gain increasing independence as their knowledge, judgment, and skills develop. Senior residents lead inpatient teams, supervise and teach interns and medical students, and assume greater responsibility for coordinating patient care. The experience is challenging by design, but residents are supported throughout that growth. 

By graduation, they are prepared to lead teams, manage complex patients, respond confidently in unfamiliar situations, and adapt to the needs of the patients and communities they serve. 

The breadth of our graduates’ careers reflects that preparation. In recent years, graduates have entered outpatient practice, hospital medicine that includes:

• inpatient pediatric care
• emergency medicine
• urgent care
• Indian Health Service practice
• rural full-spectrum family medicine. 

Their rural practices have included combinations of clinic, inpatient, emergency and both surgical and non-surgical obstetric care. Other graduates serve as medical directors and in clinical and non-clinical leadership roles throughout Iowa. Our graduates have also achieved a 100% board pass rate for more than 10 years.

Continuity clinic is a defining part of our educational identity. Through our partnership with Primary Health Care, residents care for a clinically, culturally and socioeconomically diverse patient population in a Federally Qualified Health Center located on the MercyOne Des Moines Medical Center campus. 

The clinic provides more than 1,400 patient visits each month, with residents providing most of that care. As their skills and responsibilities grow, residents progress from more than 250 continuity encounters during the first year to more than 700 during the second year and more than 750 during the third year. Through these encounters, residents build lasting relationships with patients and families, including a strong pediatric population. 

Our patients include a large Spanish-speaking population and patients from many other linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Many face significant barriers to care and have limited resources or alternative sources of medical care. Caring for these patients is both a vital service to our community and a privilege. Residents learn not only to manage complex medical conditions, but also to understand health disparities, address social determinants of health, and help patients navigate the practical barriers that influence their health. 

A clinical psychologist and resident educator and a clinical pharmacist are integrated into the clinic and faculty educational structure. They work alongside residents and physicians to provide real-time consultation, teaching, observation and feedback. Dedicated general procedure, women’s health procedure and OMM clinics are also located within the practice. This interdisciplinary environment allows residents to learn with and from multiple health professionals while providing comprehensive, coordinated care in one setting.