SCRANTON \u2014 It didn\u2019t take very long for Dr. Robert E. Wright to notice the growing physician shortage in Northeast Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
Wright, an Archbald native, had just returned to Lackawanna County in 1971 after he completed his fellowship in hematology and oncology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He wanted to find a way to address the physician shortage as well as expand his and other physicians\u2019 expertise.<\/p>\n
The business model he used led to the creation 50 years ago of The Wright Center, a physician-led nonprofit to operate clinics and partner with Temple University to train resident physicians. It was one of the first such centers in the country accredited for the model and the first in the region, according to Paul Krzywicki, the center\u2019s executive director of marketing and communications.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/CVC-L-PHARMACY04-0121.jpg\")
The Wright Center for Community Health Wilkes-Barre, 169 N. Pennsylvania Ave., seen here in August 2024, will open an on-site pharmacy in mid-March. The new pharmacy\u2019s services will be available for patients and the general public. (FILE)<\/p>\n
Wright established a physician residency program and the center partnered with area hospitals to train the residents. In 2011, The Wright Center launched the Graduate Medical Education Safety-Net Consortium to integrate patient care with workforce development to combat primary care shortages and improve access to care. The Wright Center\u2019s community health centers formed partnerships with Allied Services, Commonwealth Health, Geisinger Health System and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, to embed resident physicians where they were needed.<\/p>\n
Over time, The Wright Center expanded to 14 community health center locations in four counties and a mobile medical and dental clinic that serve more than 38,000 patients annually while creating tomorrow\u2019s healthcare professionals.<\/p>\n
Training first<\/p>\n
Wright began by establishing the Scranton-Temple Residency Program on Feb. 17, 1976 with community support and a $1 million Primary Care Workforce Development Grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Bureau of Health Manpower.<\/p>\n
The program, designed to attract medical school graduates to the region for internal medicine<\/p>\n
residencies, welcomed its inaugural class of six resident physicians one year later, in 1977.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince then, The Wright Center has expanded its accredited physician training programs to<\/p>\n
include residencies in physical medicine, rehabilitation and family medicine, as well as<\/p>\n
fellowships in cardiovascular disease, gastroenterology and geriatrics. To date, its residency<\/p>\n
and fellowship programs have graduated more than 1,100 physicians, many of whom provide<\/p>\n
care in underserved communities similar to those where they trained,\u201d according to the center\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
The residency program\u2019s board renamed the program in Wright\u2019s honor in 2010.<\/p>\n
The Wright Center\u2019s consortium has become one of the largest funded by HRSA, Krzywicki said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea was percolating for a couple of years, two to three years,\u201d said Brian Ebersole, senior vice president of strategic enterprise and ecosystem development at The Wright Centers for Community Health and Graduate Medical Education. \u201cThere was some information, research coming out about physician shortages in the \u201870s. He (Wright) was feeling it when he came back to practice in the area. He was already starting to see a shortage of primary care doctors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wright wondered what it would look like to train physicians locally, Ebersole said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the time, such a program needed a medical school partnership,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was no local medical school.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how the partnership with the Temple University program started. The program focused on developing primary care physicians and specialists.<\/p>\n
Ebersole said that at the time, there were some delays or concerns in developing infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The Wright Center incorporated in 1976.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom incorporation it took a year and half to bring in the first class of residents,\u201d Ebersole said.\u00a0 The center needed accreditation and had to recruit faculty to make sure there were enough physicians in area to be part of the education.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t a closed network that was created, it was an open invitation,\u201d Ebersole said.<\/p>\n
He said the need and opportunity were there. There had to be a funding source. The $1 million federal grant helped. But Ebersole said grants should not be looked at as sustaining operations forever. There had to be other funding.<\/p>\n
Beyond NEPA<\/p>\n
We do have partnerships that expand beyond Northeast Pennsylvania,\u201d Ebersole said, citing a partnership of about 15 years with an Ohio hospital that didn\u2019t have the infrastructure in internal and family medicine, cardiology and gastroenterology The center has helped develop residency programs in Arizona, Washington state and Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe still are a community-based consortium,\u201d Ebersole said. \u201cWe train close to 200 physicians each year. We\u2019re not insular in our model. The program places residents into a variety of settings. Some of the graduates stay with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year, 67 resident and fellow physicians graduated from the Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education during its 47th annual commencement on June 20, at Hilton Scranton and Conference Center.\u00a0Meanwhile, 60 new physicians were on board to start their residency training on July 1.<\/p>\n
Ebersole said one graduate this year stayed on as a primary care physician and educator with the center. A couple each year stay with the centers or in communities. He said the physicians train in a multiple of settings, including the Wilkes-Barre VA Medical Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t think they will all stay in the area,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wish they would.\u201d<\/p>\n
He estimated about 40% stay within the area.<\/p>\n
But there still is a need for physicians here.<\/p>\n
Ebersole said The Wright Center is still growing locally, with the addition of a Clarks Summit clinic and it recently opened a 14th\u00a0location in Carbondale. The clinics are located in Lackawanna, Luzerne, Wyoming and Wayne counties, plus the mobile unit to provide medical and dental services in other areas.<\/p>\n
An affiliation with NYU Langone Dental Medicine formed in 2021 to become a residency training site for NYU\u2019s Advanced Education in General Dentistry Program. A psychiatry program, which no longer is running, was introduced in 2017, with the last graduates graduating in 2023, Krzywicki said.<\/p>\n
First clinics<\/p>\n
The first clinic of what would be The Wright Center, the Scranton-Temple Health Center, opened across from Regional Hospital in Scranton in 1997. The second location, in Jermyn, was a clinic Dr. Linda Thomas-Hemak, current president and CEO of The Wright Centers for Community Health and Graduate Medical Education, operated before she partnered with the center and officially signed on with the residency program in 2002. Krzywicki said the Jermyn site was rebuilt in 2012.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re looking where are the needs, where are the opportunities to train not just physicians, but other health professionals.\u201d Ebersole said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re looking at an opportunity in Monroe County and in Tunkhannock,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cWhat\u2019s really important is not growth for the purpose of growing, but responding to needs in the communities or where services are starting to close up or shut down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Geisinger sponsors several residency programs in their system.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do partner with Geisinger CMC for some of the training, although they no longer fund the consortium,\u201d Ebersole said. \u201cThey provide us with learning environments.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Wright Center provides care regardless of people\u2019s ability to pay.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe provide a sliding scale based on income and assessment. If they don\u2019t have coverage or are ineligible for coverage, we connect them to coverage,\u201d Ebersole said.<\/p>\n
The sliding scale is based on the federal poverty level.<\/p>\n
The Wright Center leaders are celebrating, not just this year for the 50th\u00a0anniversary of incorporation, but also next spring to mark the anniversary of the first training of resident physicians.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working on a documentary that really tells the story of how The Wright Center has seen the community needs and responded to those needs,\u201d Ebersole said. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to see what the future holds.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SCRANTON \u2014 It didn\u2019t take very long for Dr. Robert E. Wright to notice the growing physician shortage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[18056,18057,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-240821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-biz570","tag-biz570-news","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}