The first graduation of the Peak Vista Family Medicine Residency Program is a career highlight for Dr. Scott Robinson. Since 2015, the Pikes Peak region’s only primary care residency program has trained eight physicians each year with community support from local hospitals and specialty physicians. The residents rotate through nine rural locations, including Divide, Rifle and Yuma. The program is designed to train doctors locally and encourage them to stay and practice in the region or rural Colorado.
“We [family doctors] like to be thought of as the point of first contact and the point of last contact,” he explains. “If you can imagine [your doctor] knows a majority of everything about you, medically, throughout your whole life, that [doctor] has a different perspective than a specialist that might only see you for six months or three days after the surgery.”
Dr. Michael Welch, Peak Vista’s chief medical and dental officer says Robinson is tirelessly dedicated in his role of instilling such responsibility in future doctors. “Dr. Scott Robinson is more hands-on with teaching residents than any of the core faculty, always at the bedside, always assisting with exams and teaching procedures,” Welch says. “He is an excellent mentor and supervisor.”
Robinson compares the risks of launching the residency program to dropping into a black diamond ski run. “If you just go off of the edge, you’ve got some speed and you’re making some turns,” he says. “Even if you crash 20 or 30 or 100 feet down, you still made the jump. That’s what we did when we started the residency—we made the jump. Fortunately, we didn’t crash on the way down.”
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