The York, Pa.-based system received accreditation to launch a psychiatric residency program. The system plans to train six residents each year and welcome its first residents in July 2025.
Kenneth Rogers, MD, vice president and chief medical officer for behavioral health at WellSpan, sat down with Becker’s to explain how the system built the program.
Note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: Why were you interested in building a program like this at WellSpan?
Dr. Kenneth Rogers: One of the things we noticed, especially in South Central Pennsylvania, is we have a shortage of psychiatrists in the area. We’re hoping that by building a residency, we would be able to grow our own folks, because one of the things we know from residency programs is people tend to stay where they train. If we can get residents to come in and experience life here, we feel like folks will stay, develop careers, and hopefully many of them will work for Wellspan. Even the ones that don’t work for Wellspan and go work for other systems around us, it continues to increase the number of docs in the area, which we think is our ultimate goal.
Q: How long did it take to bring the program from idea to reality?
KR: It’s been around five years, before we decided to move forward with it, maybe even a little bit longer. The biggest issue is trying to figure out the funding piece. That can get relatively expensive, especially if you’re self funding. Fortunately, we were able to get some federal grants to help us establish the program to get us moving. So from a timing standpoint, it was the perfect time to do it.
Q: How do you plan to attract residents to the program?
KR: One of the reasons why we started the program was, if you look back 10 years ago, psychiatry was not the most popular residency to choose from for medical students graduating. Over the past five years, especially post-COVID, but the trend started before COVID, psychiatry has become a really popular specialty. There are a lot of folks that want to go into psychiatry residencies, but they weren’t able to match.
Let’s build it so we can hang on to some of those students, who were sometimes matching into specialties, or sometimes not matching into a residency at all. Having one here in our area allows us to have that distribution. One of the things we know is that a lot of times, rural, far suburban areas have a little more trouble attracting psychiatrists. So by developing the program here in York, Pa., we’re able to accomplish a lot of those tasks at the same time.
Q: What do you hope to see when your first resident graduates from the program?
KR: Five years from now, when our first resident graduates, what I am hoping to see is of the six that come in, I’m hoping that four decide to stay in South Central Pennsylvania and hopefully work for Wellspan. I would like to see them as really well-trained docs who integrate into the system very easily, because they know the folks, they know the system, they know our medical record, they know how to get a consult done. They know our patient population. It’s really walking in on that first day and feeling very comfortable and being able to hit the ground running and get things moving.
I’m also hoping that as we continue to grow, that we’ll be more engaged in the community. A lot of mental health is within the walls of a health system, but much of it is how we think about working with local counties, how we think about working with state government — making sure that folks feel comfortable, really being about to consult with them, have conversations with them and be able to fully engage with the community.
Q: Do you have any advice for health systems looking to build something similar?
KR: The biggest thing is developing a consensus within the system that this is where you want to go. It’s a lot of hard work to start from ground zero and develop a program. It really takes a partnership between the physicians involved in services like psychiatry to get things up and running, the administrators of the system, the finance folks, getting through the governance piece, having someone who will be able to write the application, which is long and complex.
You’ve got to have really engaged psychiatrists who are willing to serve as faculty for the residency program. That’s sometimes not an easy sell, especially in a place where people came not expecting to have a residency program, and suddenly there is one. In other situations, people are excited to have residents, and I think we’re lucky to be in a spot where our docs have really embraced it.