Samuel Small, DO
Director, Graduate Medical Education
As the Vice President for Graduate Medical Education at Community Memorial Health System (CMHS), I am proud to invite you to explore the unique and exciting training opportunities we offer here. Our program, based in a community hospital setting and built on a philosophy of providing excellent care, grew out of a desire to teach. As physicians, we take a Hippocratic Oath, and among its covenants, designed to ensure high quality and ethical medical practice, is a commitment to teach. Many of us here have had a career-long desire to teach and participate in the training of the next generation of physicians. It was this desire, combined with the recognition that we have an incredibly well-trained medical staff, which led me to start the process of Graduate Medical Education here at CMHS.
Our reputation is well-known in the medical community. For some time, we have trained gynecological surgery residents from UCLA and general surgery residents from Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. We subsequently expanded our program to train medical students. In July 2013, we established AOA-certified residency programs, beginning with Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Orthopaedic Surgery. In July 2014, we expanded our program to include General Surgery. In April 2020 we received initial accreditation for a Psychiatry program. Today, all five of our residency programs are also ACGME accredited. In addition we also offer an integrated Behavioral Health Psychology fellowship program.
The goal of our programs is to train outstanding physicians that work in a collaborative environment and give back to the communities with which they are involved. We have a solid core of teaching faculty that has taken the pledge to train others to heart. Through their cohesive efforts, we have created a program of structured didactics and one-on-one clinical teaching that creates a high-quality learning environment for our residents and students. Within our curriculum, we emphasize strong communication skills and professional behavior to train well-rounded physicians.
We are looking for physicians interested in a distinctive opportunity to train to become leaders in providing excellent care within their communities. We look forward to hearing from you.