Nampa Residency
Welcome to the Full Circle Health Nampa Program. This is a new program, starting the first class in July 2019. This program is designed to prepare residents for practice in any setting, but particularly for the full-spectrum care needed in rural and underserved communities. In order to be prepared for this type of work, residents will need broad-scope, procedural training with emphasis on in-patient and emergency care. The Nampa Program is sponsored by the Full Circle Health, an institution with over 40 years of knowledge, expertise, and success in family medicine resident education.
This community based program offers a vibrant learning platform that is both intimate and innovative. Here in Nampa, our faculty are passionate about training excellent Family Medicine physicians by creating a trusting environment for our patients in a well-established teaching health center/FQHC. Residents have the opportunity to become proficient in upper endoscopy, colonoscopies, obstetrics and other procedures. We are an unopposed program supported by St. Luke’s Nampa, a new community hospital where residents will spend most of their in-patient rotations.
Residents are able to customize their education by participating in two away rotations (optional) and 3 rural rotations, providing an opportunity to learn how to meet the needs of their future communities. This flexibility in training is critical in building well-rounded, fulfilled physicians, prepared to practice in any setting they desire. Sub-intern rotations will be offered after July 2019.
Work with laborists running a busy L+D deck. As the unopposed family medicine residents on call, you will be managing the service, delivering babies, managing labors, assisting with C-sections, and managing triage and emergencies. You will have the opportunity to follow your newborns through their stay and into our NICU if needed. Half of our delivery suites have imbedded NICU suites allowing care of the family unit. Call is 24 hour shifts every 3-4 nights. 8 weeks R1, 4 or 6 weeks R2 and R3
Washington as a fourth year chief resident she settled in White Salmon, Washington in a small rural practice. After 12 years of wonderful, broad-spectrum, rural, community-based care she moved to Boise in 2007 to pursue teaching at the residency program. She has special interest areas in geriatrics, medical student teaching, and training the next generation of rural family doctors. When not at work she enjoys outdoor activities, camping, hiking, tandem bike riding and indoor activities of reading, sewing and spending time with her husband and two adult children.
her bike to the beach, creating science experiments usually involving the mud hole in the front yard, and spending all of her vacation time in her family’s 200 year old farm house in Vermont. She attended Villanova University outside of Philadelphia but was sent back to NJ to attend Rutgers RWJ Medical School. While majoring in Biology as an undergraduate she studied abroad in Seville, Spain (but did go on a pinxos tour in the basque country and loved it). While in medical school she travelled to the Himalayas in Northern India as part of a travelling clinic. She loves international travel but has decided to dedicate more time to visiting our National Parks.
Bari Laskow grew up in the Northeast, spending her formative years in New Jersey. She completed her undergraduate degree in the humanities at New York University – The Gallatin School, creating her own major exploring the social determinants of health. After spending some time in the NGO world in New York City, Liberia, and Guatemala, she attended medical school at the University of Pittsburgh. Taking a year off from medical school, she worked in El Salvador completing a research project on cervical cancer screening via self-collection of HPV swabs in the community. She completed residency at Swedish Cherry Hill Family Medicine in Seattle, WA where she had the privilege of matching at Sea Mar Community Health Center, an FQHC focusing on the care of the underserved Latino community. While at Swedish Cherry Hill, she completed an Area of Concentration in Reproductive Health. She is joining the Full Circle Health Nampa faculty after working at Sea Mar as a community preceptor for another year after graduation.
Jeff Pennings grew up in Upstate New York and went on to Clemson University for his Bachelor’s degree. He completed his medical education at Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine in North Carolina, where he met his wife, Dr. Kelly Pennings. Jeff and Kelly traveled across the country with their two pups during their 4th year of medical school and fell in love with Idaho.
Melissa grew up in Spokane, WA where she met and married her high school sweetheart Nathan. She then graduated from Corban University in Salem, Oregon and then completed her post-bach studies at Eastern Washington University before attending medical school at Pacific Northwest University. Melissa and Nathan have four beautiful children together and love to spend family time outside in their garden or road tripping in their 1969 airstream that they recently renovated together. Melissa can’t wait to start building relationships with her patients and the whole Braid family is very excited to start their new adventure in Idaho.
Alyssa Griffin was born and raised in the hot and marshy suburbs of New Orleans, Louisiana. She spent much of her childhood at the piano and as a violinist in the New Orleans youth symphony but discovered soon after starting high school that she would be the black sheep in her family of musicians and teachers. After spending the majority of her high school years studying the sciences, she graduated from Slidell High School and then traveled a few hours north to Memphis, Tennessee, where she attended Rhodes College. While there, she fell in love with modern languages and pursued fluency in German, studying for seven months at the University of Innsbruck in western Austria. In 2015, she graduated with degrees in neuroscience and German, and headed east to Washington, DC for medical school at the George Washington University, while her parents migrated west to a new home in Fort Collins, Colorado. While in medical school, Alyssa spent her time at the student-run Healing Clinic, where she provided comprehensive primary care and social services to residents of Washington, DC, as well as at the Arlington Free Clinic, where she served a small subset of the 11,000 uninsured individuals in Arlington County, Virginia. Both of those experiences left her with an undeniable conviction to spend her life serving the underserved. After visiting her parents out west and completing an elective at the Full Circle Health Caldwell site, she became convinced that rural family medicine would be her true academic home. In 2019, Alyssa obtained her medical degree from the George Washington University with a concentration in community and urban health and discovered she’d been matched with the Full Circle Health Nampa residency program. Alyssa is so happy to be headed westward and is excited to start her practice of family medicine in Nampa, Idaho. She and her sweet husband Phil, who works as a lawyer in the big city of Boise, are so excited to call Idaho home and cannot wait to explore all of its treasures. When not working, Alyssa loves to complete jigsaw puzzles, make macramé tapestries, and hike in the sunshine with Phil.
Cate comes to Nampa, Idaho all the way from the Sunflower State! She attended Pittsburg State University, where she majored in Biology and competed on the cross-country and track teams. She then completed medical school at the University of Kansas School of Medicine – Kansas City campus. During her time in medical school, Cate was a co-director for a women’s health and prenatal free clinic for urban underserved in Kansas City. She also had service leadership positions in Christian Medical Fellowship and American Medical Women’s Association. She is drawn to the field of Family Medicine because of the ability to provide compassionate comprehensive care for each patient. Cate is especially interested in pediatrics, tribal and rural health, and behavioral health and addiction medicine. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her husband, kayaking, hiking, cooking, knitting, and reading. She is beyond excited to become a family doc!
Sudha grew up in Bangalore, India and somehow managed to dodge the IT wave of the 90’s, to go to Medical School. While her aunt, a doctor, would be immersed in her Anatomy and Clinical Medicine books, Sudha would be fast asleep napping on her aunt’s lap. She attributes her love of medicine and future career as a doctor to those special times shared with her aunt. After completing her Medical School training and earning her MBBS degree, she went on to work at a specialty hospital in India where she was trained in managing cardiac emergencies. Sudha moved to Boise in 2012 after her marriage to her husband, and Idaho resident, Vishwa. Having lived in Boise for 7 years now, Sudha considers herself an Idahoan and cannot think of any other place as her home. While waiting for her residency training dream to materialize, she went on to train and obtain her Masters in Physician Assistant Studies and graduated from Idaho State University in 2019. Sudha grew up in a family of food lovers and her passion only compounded post marriage. In her free time, Sudha loves seeking and trying out traditional recipes from India and derives a lot of joy in cooking from scratch. Sudha believes that eating good food, followed by payback time at the gym brings about a great ‘karmic balance’ to her physical and mental fitness. Sudha is excited to this next chapter of her education and to becoming part of the inaugural class of residents trained in Nampa.
Our residents love working and playing together! Although we spend a lot of time on the wards and in the clinic, we take our time off seriously and often can be found hanging with our kids (13 in total so far between our two classes!), driving into the wilderness for a quick shed hunt (see Derek with some prize antlers on the right), or kicking back with our crochet needles, among many other cherished hobbies.
