Our Community
Sonoma County and offers all the best features of Northern California — scenic coastline and beaches, the majestic Russian River, and magical redwood forests. Sonoma County is also the home of farm-to-table dining, many diverse festivals, fantastic year-round farmers markets, scrumptious restaurants and over 425 wineries! It is a haven for mountain bikers, road bikers, paddlers, and hikers.
Santa Rosa, with a population of nearly 180,000, is the county seat of Sonoma County and the largest city in the North Bay. Santa Rosa was recently ranked as fourth of the ten California cities listed in U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of “Best Places to Live,” and is an ideal location to cultivate work-life balance.
Local attractions include the charming and walkable downtown areas of Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, Healdsburg, and Petaluma. Annadel State Park provides dozens of mountain biking and hiking trails of for all skill levels. Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, Sonoma County Children’s Museum, Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, and the world-class Green Music Center all provide ongoing happenings.
While most physicians live in Santa Rosa, you can live in quite a wide variety of settings within a 20- minute radius of Santa Rosa, including Sebastopol, Windsor, Healdsburg, Kenwood, and the hip town of Petaluma. You will have “small city” as well as rural options. College town neighborhoods include the Santa Rosa’s “JC (Junior College) area” or Rohnert Park (home to Sonoma State University) and there are beautiful rural settings in west county such as Forestville.
Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center
Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center consists of a 173-bed hospital and four medical office buildings. We are the largest healthcare provider in Sonoma County, providing care to over 166,000 members. The hospital has 173 patient beds, including a dedicated pediatric wing. A newly renovated labor & delivery floor has 8 labor and delivery rooms and 2 delivery operating rooms to accommodate almost 2,000 annual births (almost 200 births per month). The ICU has 20 beds and there are 34 emergency department bays. Click here to read more about the services we provide.
The Family Medicine residency is the first ACGME-sponsored residency at Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center. Family Medicine residents from Sutter Regional Hospital also have regularly scheduled rotations in several specialty departments at our facility. We have been teaching medical students at our facility for decades, regularly hosting third-year medical students from UCSF and Touro-California for their core clerkships in addition to our fourth-year residency sub-interns who visit from schools around the country.
Our Patient Population
As a medical center that provides care to over 60% of the entire population of Sonoma County, and over 75% of the Medicare population of Santa Rosa, our patients reflect the broad diversity of our county demographics. Residents will care for individuals and multi-generational families within a socioeconomically diverse patient population. With approximately 10-15% Medicare, 10-15% Medicaid, and 15-20% ACA patients, all residents will care for underserved patients, those living rurally with increased access barriers to care, food- and housing-insecure families, and many medically vulnerable older adults living in poverty.
The largest ethnic minority in our patient population is Latinx/Hispanic, accounting for a growing portion of patient membership; many of the staff (MA, RN) in our family medicine center are bilingual/bicultural Spanish-speaking, and residents/faculty with Spanish language skills can cultivate a patient panel with a significant proportion of Spanish-speakers. Over 29 languages are spoken regularly at our medical center; other more represented ethnic and racial minorities in our patient population include African American, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian. Our county is home to several recent immigrant communities including Eritrean and Syrian refugee families. 24-hour phone or video translation is available to help physicians care for patients speaking a multitude of languages, including ASL.
We are also a community with a large population of people identifying as LGBTQ+, including many faculty, residents, and employees/leaders on our campus. As a resident, gender and sexual health will be part of your standard curriculum and you will have the opportunity to care for many patients of all ages across the gender and sexuality spectrum.
Patient Advisory Councils
Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa is proud to be a leader in patient and family centered care. Our first patient advisory council was established in 2005, and we have expanded to a total of eight separate councils at the medical center. Our family medicine patient advisory council started in 2013. This council partners with physicians and managers to address challenges and issues that arise within our department. Our advisory council assists with anything from campus beautification projects, to interviewing physicians applying for employment. We look forward to continuing to team with our advisory councils to improve the overall patient experience at the medical center.
Our Community Partners
Petaluma Health Center takes a whole person approach to keeping community healthy.
The KPSR Family Medicine Residency has been carefully designed so residents gain experience working with underserved populations. A key aspect of our curriculum is that all residents participate in a longitudinal continuity clinic at Petaluma Health Center (PHC). PHC is a Federally Qualified Healthcare Center which serves approximately 26,000 people per year, of whom approximately 50% are racial and ethnic minorities, 33% are prefer a language other than English, 95% have incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, and 25% are completely uninsured. While working at Petaluma Health Center, Residents are precepted by a PHC physicians & our Kaiser Permanente Community Health Fellow who works at Petaluma Health Center on a half time basis. The goal of this longitudinal experience is for residents to understand that achieving the total health of a community requires a comprehensive, collaborative approach with community partners.
PHC is committed to providing comprehensive, integrative care, with the goal of improving the health of everyone in our community, particularly those who cannot otherwise afford excellent health care. PHC is widely recognized for its innovative approach to healthcare and has been on the leading edge of team-based care since 2007, emphasizing overall wellness and the value of the patient/provider relationship. At PHC, patients are encouraged to take control of their health and wellness by establishing a trusting relationship with their integrated health care team.