Our History

The Primary Care & Social Internal Medicine Residency Program is a fusion of general internal medicine and social medicine with one curriculum, faculty, leadership and ambulatory site.  The program is highly respected at Montefiore and nationwide.  It is integrated into the Montefiore Categorical Internal Medicine Residency as an ACGME accredited internal medicine residency and shares unique curriculum and faculty with the Department of Family and Social Medicine.

The Department of Social Medicine, the first of its kind in the country, was established in the 1950’s.  Its initiatives paralleled larger social initiatives from the civil rights movement led by the Black Panther and Young Lords Movement, with the goal of addressing the social and structural issues the people of the Bronx. 

While the Young Lords were testing for lead poisoning in the community, creating a Patient Bill of Rights, and providing breakfast to school children, the Department of Social Medicine developed programs including the Community Health Participation Program, the Child Care Health Project, the Addiction Services Agency Consultation and Training Project, methadone maintenance programs, and prison health programs at Rikers Island. Additionally, the Department created and delivered social medicine curricula across the New York City area.

Solidifying its commitment to the future of social medicine, the Residency Program in Social Medicine was developed in the 1970s.  Its first clinical home was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Health Center - one of the first community health centers in the country.  The MLK Health Center closed down due to the financial crisis in New York City in the 1980s but was succeeded by the Comprehensive Health Care Center in the South Bronx, the current clinical home of the PCSIM program.

The Primary Care Track was created during the 1990’s following the Institute of Medicine 1996 Report, Primary care: America’s Health in a New Era, which envisioned primary care as the “logical foundation for the U.S. health care system of the future” and a vehicle to “promote an integrated continuum from primary care to public health”. 

We recognized that primary care serves as the ideal modality for providing structurally competent care, social justice minded care.  Thus in 2011, the Primary Care and Social Internal Medicine tracks were combined, creating a unified program with one curriculum, ambulatory site, leadership, and faculty.