The question is worth addressing directly because most medical education still defaults to the assumption that hospital-based training is the standard and community-based training is an alternative.
The data increasingly suggests otherwise — at least for physicians whose careers will be spent in primary care.
Physicians who train in community health settings are significantly more likely to practice in those settings after graduation. The Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education program, which funds several of the programs below, has tracked this outcome across its 3,090+ program graduates since 2011: physicians trained in FQHCs and community health centers disproportionately return to practice in medically underserved communities.
The clinical explanation is straightforward. An FQHC residency trains you in the environment where most primary care in America actually happens — not in academic medical centers with immediate subspecialty backup, but in outpatient community settings where the physician is often the first, last, and only point of contact for complex patients managing multiple chronic conditions on limited resources. That requires a different kind of clinical formation than hospital training provides.
For Florida specifically, the case is even clearer. Florida’s non-expansion of Medicaid leaves the state with one of the highest uninsured rates in the country. Miami-Dade County’s uninsured rate is among the highest of any major metropolitan county nationally. The patients at Florida FQHCs are not a narrow slice of the population — they represent the full complexity of what primary care in a high-poverty, multilingual, underinsured urban environment demands.
Training in that environment — rather than being placed in it after completing a hospital-based residency — is a different kind of preparation.
Miami, Florida (Brownsville / Miami-Dade County)
ACGME Accredited | THCGME-Funded | 4 Residents Per Cohort
Website: jtchs.org/our-services/family-medicine-residency/
The newest of Florida’s FQHC residency programs and arguably the one with the most historically significant setting.
Jessie Trice Community Health System is Florida’s first federally qualified health center — the fifth established in the entire United States — founded in 1967 by Jessie Collins Trice, a nurse from Georgia who became the first Black person to graduate from the University of Miami, and who started the clinic in a trailer in the Brownsville neighborhood of Miami. That trailer became 16 facilities, 8 comprehensive primary care centers, and 40 school-based health suites across Miami-Dade County.
The residency program was established through a Teaching Health Center Planning and Development Grant and is housed in the Annie Neasman Teaching and Research Annex. Residents rotate through the full breadth of JTCHS services — pediatrics, women’s health, psychiatry, behavioral health, optometry, and podiatry — at JTCHS clinic sites, with inpatient training at North Shore Medical Center, Jackson Memorial Hospital, and Larkin Community Hospital.
The program trains four residents per cohort in the same Brownsville community where the FQHC movement in Florida was born. CMO Dr. Joycelyn Lawrence, who leads the program’s clinical vision, has noted that Florida ranks fifth in the nation for health professional shortage areas — and that physicians trained in underserved settings are the most likely to remain in them.
Why it’s distinctive: Training at the institution that started it all in Florida, in the neighborhood where it started, with a patient population that has depended on this organization for nearly 60 years.
Contact: jtchs.org | (305) 637-6400
Miami, Florida (Little Haiti / Wynwood area)
ACGME Accredited (Code: 1201100743) | THCGME-Funded | 12 Residents (4 per year)
Website: borinquenhealth.org/programs/fmrp/
The most programmatically distinctive of Florida’s FQHC residency programs — and the one with the broadest curriculum footprint.
Borinquen Health Care Center serves Miami’s Puerto Rican and broader Latino community alongside Haitian, African American, and LGBTQ+ patient populations in one of Miami’s most culturally complex neighborhoods. The residency trains 12 residents across three years in this environment, building bilingual Spanish-English competency alongside a curriculum that explicitly includes HIV medicine and Lifestyle Medicine — Borinquen is one of the few FQHC residencies in the country to embed the full American College of Lifestyle Medicine curriculum into its training, allowing graduates to sit for the Lifestyle Medicine Board Exam upon completion.
The program’s partnership with Florida International University’s NeighborhoodHELP program brings a dimension that few residencies anywhere offer: structured home visits to patients in their own communities, supervised by FIU faculty. Residents don’t just see patients in clinic — they see where patients live, and understand what their care looks like in that context.
The program is explicitly mission-driven and explicitly LGBTQ+ affirming, with HIV curricula woven into training that reflects Borinquen’s longstanding role in serving Miami’s HIV-positive community.
Why it’s distinctive: The combination of HIV medicine, Lifestyle Medicine board preparation, FIU home visit partnerships, and an explicitly LGBTQ+ affirming training environment makes this one of the most programmatically rich FQHC residencies in the Southeast.
Contact: Tatiana Posso, Program Coordinator | (305) 576-6611 x1605 | tposso@borinquenhealth.org
Miami, Florida (Multiple Sites, Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties)
ACGME Accredited | THCGME-Funded | Family Medicine + Psychiatry
Website: chisouthfl.org/teaching-health-center/programs/family-medicine-residency/
Community Health of South Florida is one of Florida’s largest FQHC networks, operating 13 health centers across Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties and serving one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse patient populations in the United States. Its THCGME-funded programs in both family medicine and psychiatry represent something relatively rare: an FQHC that has invested in residency training across two specialties simultaneously, reflecting an integrated behavioral-physical health model that is increasingly recognized as the direction community health care needs to move.
The family medicine program uses a Patient-Centered Medical Home model that addresses not just patients’ physical health but mental health and socioeconomic circumstances — a curriculum designed to produce physicians who understand that clinical medicine in underserved communities cannot be separated from the social determinants of health. CHI’s patient population speaks Spanish, Haitian Creole, and dozens of other languages, and its clinical environment is one of the most genuinely multilingual primary care training settings in Florida.
The psychiatry program’s existence alongside family medicine is itself a signal about CHI’s vision for what community health residency training should become — an integrated approach that mirrors how care must be delivered in communities where mental health and primary care have historically been divided rather than coordinated.
Why it’s distinctive: The dual specialty investment in family medicine and psychiatry — rare in any residency environment and especially in FQHCs — signals a serious commitment to integrated behavioral health training that reflects where community medicine is heading.
Contact: chisouthfl.org
Clearwater, Florida (Pinellas County / Tampa Bay)
ACGME Accredited (Code: 1201100003) | THCGME-Funded | 6 Residents Per Year | ACGME Osteopathic Recognition
Website: evarahealth.org/residency-program/
The only FQHC-based family medicine residency program in Florida outside of South Florida, and the only one with ACGME Osteopathic Recognition — making it one of the few programs in the state where DO graduates can train in an FQHC setting with full osteopathic recognition.
Evara Health (formerly Community Health Centers of Pinellas) has been serving Pinellas County for over 40 years, providing affordable primary care to a diverse, predominantly low-income patient population across the Tampa Bay area. The residency program accepts six residents per year and trains primarily in outpatient community settings, with inpatient rotations at Bayfront Health St. Petersburg, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, Morton Plant Hospital, and Bay Pines VA Hospital — a hospital network that gives residents broad clinical exposure while keeping the training anchored in community health.
The program also incorporates a Lifestyle Medicine curriculum, consistent with a growing movement among FQHC residencies to embed lifestyle-oriented primary care training — nutrition, physical activity, sleep health, stress management — into the formal curriculum as core competencies rather than electives.
Why it’s distinctive: The only FQHC residency in Florida outside South Florida, the only one with ACGME Osteopathic Recognition, and the Tampa Bay regional anchor for community health physician training.
Program Director: Dr. Carlos R. Rodriguez
Contact: Aubrey Zakshevsky | (727) 824-8181 x5242 | evarahealth.org
Several Florida family medicine residency programs are not fully FQHC-based but include meaningful FQHC clinical training as part of their curriculum. These are worth knowing for medical students who want FQHC exposure within a broader hospital-affiliated program.
HCA Florida Ocala Hospital / UCF Family Medicine Residency — Ocala, FL. Explicitly incorporates an FQHC primary care clinic into its training model alongside community hospital experience. A hybrid option for residents who want both settings. hcahealthcaregme.com
HCA Florida North Florida Hospital Family Medicine Residency — Gainesville area. Program clinic is an FQHC providing comprehensive primary care regardless of ability to pay. Hospital-based program with community health clinic training. hcahealthcaregme.com
Larkin Community Hospital Family Medicine Residency — Hialeah, FL. Partner institution for JTCHS inpatient rotations, and a program with FQHC-adjacent training in one of Florida’s most diverse clinical environments. Includes a rural rotation in Islamorada. freida.ama-assn.org
Looking at these programs together, a few things are immediately apparent.
Florida’s FQHC residency capacity is heavily concentrated in Miami-Dade. Three of the four pure FQHC programs — JTCHS, Borinquen, and CHI — are in Miami. Evara Health in Clearwater is the only program serving the rest of the state. For a state with 67 counties and significant physician shortages across the Panhandle, North Central Florida, and Southwest Florida’s agricultural corridors, this is a significant gap.
All four programs have THCGME federal funding. This means they are federally recognized as addressing genuine physician shortage needs and are accountable to HRSA for outcomes data. It also means residents at these programs have clear pathways to NHSC loan repayment upon graduation — potentially $75,000 to $80,000 in tax-free loan forgiveness for a two-year service commitment at an NHSC-eligible site.
The Miami programs reflect Miami’s specific complexity. The bilingual demands, the HIV medicine curricula, the Haitian Creole patient populations, the farmworker health corridors reachable from South Florida — these programs are training physicians for a clinical environment that has almost no equivalent anywhere else in the country. A physician who completes the Borinquen or CHI program is prepared for something specific and genuinely rare.
The gap between Florida’s physician shortage and its FQHC residency capacity is large. Florida projects a shortage of nearly 18,000 physicians by 2035. Its four FQHC residency programs collectively train fewer than 30 new residents per year. The math is stark. Florida needs more programs like these — and the physicians who complete them need to stay.
Physicians who train at Florida FQHC residency programs and remain in community health practice have access to two significant loan repayment programs that can substantially change the financial picture of a community health career.
National Health Service Corps (NHSC) Loan Repayment Program: Up to $75,000 to $80,000 in tax-free loan repayment for a two-year full-time commitment at an NHSC-approved site. Most Florida FQHCs are NHSC-eligible. The rural community version of the program offers up to $105,000 for three years of rural service.
Florida FRAME Program: Florida’s state-level loan repayment program provides up to $150,000 over four years for physicians practicing in underserved areas of Florida. Stacked with NHSC, the combined benefit can exceed $200,000 in loan repayment for physicians who remain in Florida community health practice.
For a resident graduating with $200,000 or more in medical school debt — which describes most physicians entering practice today — these programs transform what would otherwise be a financial sacrifice into a financially competitive career choice.
All four Florida FQHC residency programs participate in the NRMP Match through the standard ERAS application process. Each program has its own requirements for USMLE/COMLEX scores, clinical experience, and visa eligibility — check FREIDA (the AMA’s residency database) or each program’s website directly for current requirements.
The programs are small — four to twelve positions per year — and competitive in proportion to their mission clarity. Applications from physicians with demonstrated commitment to community health, underserved populations, or primary care in shortage areas are the ones that resonate.
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