Southwest Oklahoma has 11 new doctors after Memorial Health, partnering with Oklahoma State University, welcomed them into its residency program.
These residents were greeted with Memorial Health’s 12th annual Physician Resident Welcome Celebration.
Emergency Medicine Program Director Dr. William Bickell and Family Medicine Program Director Dr. Mercedez Bernard were excited to meet the incoming doctors.
“You can kind of see the butterflies and the excitement and the apprehension when they’re coming,” Bickell said.
Bernard said residents have a lot of opportunities to learn.
“In every rotation that they go on,” she said. “Whether it’s Pediatrics or surgery, psychiatry, the outpatient clinic, every opportunity is a chance to fill their gap in knowledge and to learn more about the patient population that felt serves someday.”
For the next three years, seven residents will serve the community while learning more about emergency medicine, and four others will focus on family medicine, like Dr. Joshua Lamar.
“I really like how you get to serve the whole family,” he said. “Babies, their parents and their grandparents. Getting to be in-clinic and getting to know your patients is just a very unique experience.”
He plans to stay local after completing his residency in three years, and many other incoming residents feel the same.
Dr. Carly Sweat, a Geronimo native, is one of them.
“I always knew that I wanted to do medicine,” she said. “I wanted to serve rural Oklahoma in some capacity.”
Sweat added staying near her hometown was important to her.
“I’m from Geronimo, Oklahoma originally,” she said. “When I decided I wanted to go into medicine, serving patients in my community, that was really my big motivator, being able to come back.”
Dr. Kyle Meraz, who’s from Lawton, has already cared for the community as a nurse with Memorial Health. Now that he’s back as a physician resident specializing in emergency medicine, he says his experience at MHS helped him become the doctor he is today.
“I think it’s been really good clinical experience to get it hands on,” he said. “It definitely made the transition to clinicals for medical school a lot smoother, and then it helps with some of the fundamental basic knowledge for the didactics as well.“
This program just keeps growing. According to Memorial Health’s website, its residency program has seen 85 graduates, and 48 of them stayed in-state, continuing to provide Oklahomans with care.
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