Hospitals

Boston Medical Center

Boston Medical Center (BMC) was formed in 1996 as a result of the merger of Boston City Hospital and Boston University Medical Center Hospital. The Boston City Hospital is now the Menino Pavilion of BMC and continues to be one of the outstanding municipal teaching hospitals in the United States. It was established in 1864 and has long been a center of excellence in patient care, education, and research. An acute care, full-service hospital, Boston City traditionally provided high quality healthcare to inner-city residents, fulfilling its mission as Boston’s only public hospital. BCH served as a major site for medical student teaching as well as house officer and fellowship training. The Boston University Medical Center Hospital, now the Newton Pavilion of BMC, was founded in 1912 as one of the leading hospitals combining the triad of patient care, physician training and research. The combined BMC retained the medical staff, the adjacent facilities and both the academic and public service missions of its predecessors. BMC has been enjoying rapid expansion recently with the Shaprio Ambulatory Care Center, the Moakley Cancer Center, numerous clinical centers of excellence and research centers.

VA Boston Healthcare System

The VA Boston Healthcare system serves as a major teaching affiliate and offers an unequaled training environment to supplement the training program. The VA Boston system is comprised of several distinct campuses and numerous community-based outpatient clinics, and it serves as a major referral center for the entire New England region. Residents participate in ambulatory experiences at the Jamaica Plain campus and inpatient rotations at the West Roxbury campus.

As the largest provider of graduate medical education in the United States, the VA takes its educational mission very seriously, and the VA Boston has a particularly rich academic history. All teaching faculty at the VA Boston have dual academic appointments at Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School, and housestaff teams are composed of a mix of interns and residents from training programs at Boston Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Trainees at the VA Boston are exposed to a challenging and rewarding patient population characterized by a heavy burden of chronic illness, particularly cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases and medical problems resulting from specific circumstances such as traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injury. The VA system also affords residents the unique opportunity to experience a national-scope, single-payer, integrated health system that has been at the vanguard of medical information technology, patient safety, and quality improvement developments.