Thomas Kim, MD, MPH, FAAFP, Chief Medical Officer, Esperanza Health Centers
Welcome to the Rush-Esperanza Family Medicine Residency. We are thrilled that you are interested in learning more about the program and embarking on the next chapter of your family medicine training with us!
Started in 2004 as a small community health center with only three providers, Esperanza Health Centers today is one of the most respected Federally Qualified Health Centers in the nation, with eight clinical sites across the primarily Latino neighborhoods of Chicago’s West and Southwest sides. We provide care annually to more than 54,000 patients, regardless of ability to pay, and we believe this access to a primary care team providing comprehensive, continuous, compassionate, and coordinated care can be the key to improving community health outcomes. We’ve earned the prestigious National Quality Leader Award from HRSA on eight occasions since 2016, a distinction received by fewer than 3% of FQHCs each year and a testament to our passion for quality care and innovation. And we want you to be a part of our movement!
As a Teaching Health Center grantee through the Health Resources and Services Administration, we believe that the community setting where you aspire to spend your family medicine career is also the best place to learn. Esperanza’s proven community-oriented model for primary care serves as a training environment that ensures you will never settle for less than the best for your patients. Here, you’ll find like-minded individuals who have dedicated their careers to building trust and partnership with the patients and families they serve. Our doctors use their clinical skills for healing, their voices for advocacy, and their arms to link together with all those aligned in the mission for community health.
It is an immense privilege to be a family physician, where we are invited to be a part of the joys and despairs of our patients’ lives. We guide them through celebrations and heartaches, the uncertain moments and the mundane ones, and our relational work to accompany them must bring steady hope in the midst of suffering. Not coincidentally, esperanza means hope, and the journalist Krista Tippett once said, “Hope is a muscle, a practice, a choice that actually propels new realities into being. And it’s a muscle we can strengthen.” Through the practice and learning of family medicine, we invite you to choose strengthening that muscle here at Esperanza, to propel new realities for the patients you serve, and join us in our mission to deliver health and hope for Chicago’s underserved communities.