Message from the Program Director
Thank you for your interest in the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, one of the oldest physician training programs in the Western United States. For the past century, Cottage Hospital has offered residents excellent clinical training in a unique environment, through its position as both a regional tertiary care center and level one trauma center, as well as an exemplary community teaching hospital.
The Internal Medicine Residents at Cottage proudly provide care to our region’s more underserved patients, through both inpatient and outpatient rotations supervised by an experienced, diverse and expert core clinical faculty. Our residents benefit from the educationally-optimal balance between support and autonomy, leading directly to accelerated growth as a physician. Here, you’ll engage in the incredibly important work of caring for patients with diverse and underserved needs, with the support of a core faculty whose main focus is to teach clinical medicine.
My own path was forever changed when I rotated through Cottage as a visiting fourth-year medical student from UCSD School of Medicine. I was struck by the excellence of clinical teaching in a community hospital, combined with the diversity of pathology that was seen due to Cottage Hospital’s position as the region’s tertiary care center, and was fortunate to train here myself.
The Internal Medicine Residency Program offers the best of both worlds—the opportunity to learn excellent clinical medicine and a setting to see some of the most unusual and advanced diseases. As a regional referral facility, you’ll find our program to be a hidden treasure on California’s Central Coast. As a resident here, you’ll learn intensively through a large volume of interesting cases—and when you leave the hospital, you’ll have the beach, the mountains, excellent restaurants, cultural events and world-class recreation at your doorstep.
Based on feedback from residents, we recently made the change in our training program from a traditional Internal Medicine model to a block—or x plus y—model. We completed our first full year of the block schedule to universally positive and enthusiastic feedback from our residents.
We invite you to learn more and join our 100 years of excellence in Graduate Medical Education.
Lynn Fitzgibbons, MD, FIDSA
Director, Internal Medicine Residency Program
