Nearly a year ago, in Jan. 2025, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education — which monitors graduate medical education programs to make sure participants deliver safe and high-quality care — withdrew accreditation from West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, rendering it unable to host its family medicine residency program. Among about 30 resident doctors, some completed their residencies by June 30, when the program officially ended, but most are completing their education elsewhere.
The future of other services at West Sub is uncertain, as the hospital continues to struggle financially.
Prior to its dissolution, the family medicine residency program at West Suburban was critically acclaimed. In honor of the physicians who trained there and the educators who shaped them, this month, the Illinois Academy of Family Physicians gave the Family Medicine Residency Program at West Sub its President’s Award.
The annual IAFP award is given by the organization’s outgoing president, who recognizes an impactful individual or group. IAFP President Dr. Kate Rowland awarded West Sub’s family medicine residency program for its historically wide scope of sought-after training and its service to patients, many of whom are on Medicaid or uninsured.
“Particularly in the last 20 years, so many graduates have cared for underserved patients in urban settings, rural settings and international settings,” Paul Luning, chief medical officer of PCC Community Wellness Center since 2007, told Austin Weekly News. West Suburban contracts services from PCC, a Federally Qualified Health Center that hosted resident doctors at four of its sites.
Ginnie Flynn, IAFP’s vice president of communication and member engagement, told Austin Weekly News that family medicine physicians, like those who have trained at West Sub, provide a necessary continuity of care, “especially when access to high-quality care for at-risk communities is so needed.”
“Not only do they help through the pregnancy process and the childbirth, then they can stay there afterwards and be that same child’s physician and that same mom’s physician. That’s so unique to family medicine,” Flynn said. “It’s a daunting process to carry a child and deliver it, and it’s nice to have someone you know with you along the entire journey.”
The program’s legacy
Dr. Allison Burdick started the family medicine residency program in 1971. Luning graduated from the program in 1998. The previous year was the first that residents at West Suburban got an outpatient, three-year experience at PCC. Luning said, back then, it was uncommon to teach residents at a Federally Qualified Health Center.
“At the time, we didn’t really know what kind of impact West Sub’s family medicine program would have on training future doctors with underserved populations,” Luning said. But the program had a reputation for intense, full-scope training, “which not all programs focused on to the degree West Sub did.” Luning added, “We saw lots of patients that were very complicated socially, emotionally and physically.”
Luning said the same reasons he was drawn to the family medicine residency program nearly 30 years ago inspired him to recruit new attendings as PCC’s chief medical officer today.
“I want people that work at PCC to be very good doctors. I want them to have breadth. I want them to have compassion. I want them to be able to withstand the pressure of the job. And I knew that hiring somebody that had done residency at West Suburban was going to be not just up to the task, but committed to the task,” Luning said.
Dr. Anastasia Crihfield—a family medicine physician at PCC Salud Family Health Center in Belmont Cragin, one of the four sites where residents at West Sub worked—graduated from the family medicine residency program at West Sub in 2018 and spoke highly of her educational clinical experience.
“One of the strengths that it always had was labor and delivery, where you got a wide breadth and good volume of experience as a family physician,” Crihfield told Austin Weekly News. That included experience in complicated deliveries, newborn nurseries, the NICU and ICU “to a degree that not a lot of family physicians always get trained in.”
Crihfield specifically mentions how impressed she was with the program’s main coordinator Vineata Smith, who managed the program and its logistics for decades. She calls Smith the “heart and soul of the residency” and “the backbone of it, organizationally.”
“West Suburban shaped not only the doctor I would become, but the kind of colleague, leader and advocate I strive to be today,” Dr. Rebecca Maddrell, also a graduate of the program, said as she helped present the President’s award. Maddrell is also one of two of the family medicine residency program graduates who are IAFP board members. About 140 graduates of the program are members of IAFP.
“You did not choose West Sub because it was easy — you chose it because it prepared you for anything,” Maddrell said. “We ran the ICU for six months without an in-house attending [physician]. We carried patient lists of 20 or 30. We saw exhaustion, challenge and responsibility. And somehow, I still miss those days. The confidence, resilience and clinical breadth we gained became the foundation for how we care for patients today.”
The loss of the family medicine residency program
When West Sub’s family medicine residency program lost accreditation earlier this year, about 20 residents had to find another location to continue their residency.
“The loss of West Suburban’s family residency program is a significant loss, particularly in a state that already struggles to recruit and retain family physicians, especially in underserved areas,” Rowland said while presenting the President’s award.
“It was one of the most sought-after programs in the country at one time,” Flynn told Austin Weekly News. “To lose a training program that was training around 10 residents a year, that’s a huge impact on our workforce. To lose 30 potential family physicians that could have stayed and trained here and practiced here, that’s a loss for family medicine, and that’s a loss for communities.”
And PCC had to find replacements for the nearly 30 resident doctors who were once assigned to four of its sites and made up over a quarter of PCC’s entire medical provider workforce. One site, the PCC Dr. Burdick Family Health Center located inside West Suburban, was entirely staffed by resident doctors.
“When the residency program closed, we thought we were going to have to close that site,” Luning said. He added that PCC experienced an immediate issue with patient access, as a shortage of providers made it difficult to get appointments. Then, PCC struggled to recruit new doctors, since 90% of the ones they hire typically come from the family medicine residency program at West Sub or one of PCC’s fellowship programs, according to Luning.
While PCC has since recruited new providers to fill the gap, Luning said it’s been hard on PCC’s prenatal care services. While prenatal care is still a large focus for PCC, Luning said there aren’t as many doctors who specialize in it as there used to be.
At the Dr. Burdick Family Health Center, PCC hired four newly graduated physician assistants. Those PAs now work alongside a veteran family doctor who previously taught residents.
“This has been a great opportunity for new grads who want to make sure they have extra support and mentorship and still allowing for family physicians who are interested in teaching to help guide new providers in a similar, but slightly different, environment,” Crihfield said.
PCC is hoping to pick up the legacy of West Sub’s family medicine residency program by sponsoring the residency itself, becoming a teaching health center through a federally funded program.
“We’ve got all these faculty who taught at West Sub, and we know that there are residents and Chicago med students that want to do training and serve this population,” Luning said. “We were so sad about the program closing, but we want to be able to look forward and not just look back. We want to continue doing this kind of work.”
The family medicine residency program isn’t the only West Sub resource that has been cut. Resident doctors have been airing concerns about patient safety because of declining services since last spring.
Last November, midwives and family medicine physicians at West Suburban Medical Center were told that, because of liability insurance, they would no longer be able to deliver babies at the hospital.
In July, staff working on West Sub’s Family Birthplace floor — consisting of labor and delivery, postpartum and nursery units — were escorted out of the hospital without warning mid-shift and were told the floor would be closed indefinitely.
Over the summer, a building on West Sub’s River Forest campus had a malfunctioning HVAC unit that caused water damage to two floors. And the campus’ elevators didn’t pass inspection for a solid year.
