Family Medicine News Archive Featured in the Media JeffNEWS

U.S.News & World Report has ranked the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University as one of America’s best Departments of Family Medicine.

Jefferson was recognized for having one of the top 20 Family Medicine programs at a medical school in the United States. The magazine also ranked Jefferson’s Department as the fourth highest ranked Department housed in a private medical school and was the number one ranked Department from a school located in the North-East section of the country, noted Richard C. Wender, M.D., Alumni Professor and Chair, Department of Family and Community Medicine at Jefferson.

Each year, U.S. News ranks professional-school programs in business, education, engineering, law, and medicine. These rankings are based on two types of data: expert opinion about program quality, and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research, and students. For the rankings in all five areas, indicator and opinion data come from surveys of more than 1,200 programs and some 9,600 academics and professionals conducted in fall 2005.

“This recognition is a tribute to our faculty, residents, fellows and staff, as well as to the curriculum Jefferson offers to medical students seeking to become primary care physicians,” said Dr. Wender.

For the past 30 years, for example, Jefferson’s family medicine program has offered the Physician Shortage Area Program (PSAP), developed to address the long-standing shortage of physicians in rural communities by recruiting students who have grown up in a rural area and

are committed to practicing family medicine in the same or similar area. The PSAP, which is led by the Department of Family and Community Medicine, has become a model for other medical schools to follow.

Physicians from throughout the Delaware Valley have come to know Jefferson for its quality of care provided by Family Medicine. Jefferson has one of the strongest family medicine educational programs in the country, offering residency and fellowship programs and treating roughly 50,000 patients per year. Jefferson family physicians provide comprehensive primary care services for both acute and chronic problems and have received national recognition for their use of innovative practice management techniques such as open access appointment scheduling and chronic disease management systems in multiple locations, including patients’ homes.

Thomas Jefferson University Hospital also has major programs for heart disease, cancer treatment, neuroscience, high-risk childbirth, genetics, radiology, orthopaedics, digestive diseases and many other areas of medicine and surgery. It is one of only a few hospitals in the United States that is both a Level I Trauma Center and a federally designated regional spinal cord injury center. Jefferson’s Kimmel Cancer Center is designated as a clinical cancer center by the National Cancer Institute.

U.S.News and World Report has consistently ranked many of Jefferson's services as among the best in the nation. These include rehabilitation, cardiology/cardiac surgery, orthopaedics, digestive disorders (gastroenterology), geriatrics, gynecology, neurology and neurosurgery (which are both based at Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience), otolaryngology - head and neck surgery, and urology.

In addition, Jefferson physicians have been named among the best doctors by Philadelphia Magazine and by Best Doctors in America.

Jefferson has been ranked among “The Top Hospitals In America” by Modern Maturity, AARP’s magazine for people over 50.

For eight years in a row, Jefferson University Hospital has been awarded the Consumer Choice Award by the National Research Corporation (NRC), for being an innovator and leader in health care in Philadelphia.

In addition, Jefferson University Hospital was the recipient of the HealthGrades 2004 Distinguished Hospital Award for Excellence.™