MACON/SAVANNAH/COLUMBUS – Mercer University School of Medicine (MUSM) celebrated the 2021 National Residency Match on March 19 at noon on all three of its campuses in Macon, Savannah and Columbus.
A total of 126 graduating students – 100% who wanted residencies – were matched to postgraduate training programs in hospitals in Georgia and other states. Of those, a record 89% will be entering into a core specialty for the first year of residency training and a record 84% will be practicing in a core specialty for their entire residency.
Records were also set for the percentage of Class of 2021 graduates matching into Georgia residencies (48.4%) and residencies with Mercer-affiliated teaching hospitals (23%), including Atrium Navicent Health and HCA Coliseum in Macon, Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah and Piedmont Columbus Regional Hospital.
Core specialties include family medicine, general internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, general surgery, psychiatry, and emergency medicine.
“The Class of 2021 is a wonderful group of accomplished students who are committed to helping provide access to quality health care for all Georgians,” said Jean Sumner, M.D., FACP, dean of MUSM. “We are very proud of these outstanding young, soon-to-be physicians, who will be the kind of doctors this state so desperately needs.”
About Mercer University School of Medicine (Macon, Savannah and Columbus)
Mercer University’s School of Medicine was established in 1982 to educate physicians and health professionals to meet the primary care and health care needs of rural and medically underserved areas of Georgia. Today, more than 60 percent of graduates currently practice in the state of Georgia, and of those, more than 80 percent are practicing in rural or medically underserved areas of Georgia. Mercer medical students benefit from a problem-based medical education program that provides early patient care experiences. Such an academic environment fosters the early development of clinical problem-solving and instills in each student an awareness of the place of the basic medical sciences in medical practice. The School opened a full four-year campus in Savannah in 2008 at Memorial University Medical Center. In 2012, the School began offering clinical education for third- and fourth-year medical students in Columbus. Following their second year, students participate in core clinical clerkships at the School’s primary teaching hospitals: Medical Center, Navicent Health in Macon; Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah; and Piedmont Columbus Regional Hospital and St. Francis Hospital in Columbus. The School also offers master’s degrees in family therapy, preclinical sciences and biomedical sciences and a Ph.D. in rural health sciences.
