The Reproductive Health Care and Advocacy Fellowship is now accepting applications! This one-year fellowship is open to family physicians and aims to develop leaders who will promote and teach full-spectrum reproductive health care within family medicine. There are currently four fellowship positions available: three based in New York City at Institute for Family Health-affiliated residencies and one in Boston at the Tufts University Family Medicine Residency at Cambridge Health Alliance.

Fellows will be “trainers in training,” learning to perform reproductive health procedures and how to teach these procedures to others. Fellows will develop leadership skills by giving presentations during the residency curriculum sessions, as well as at academic family medicine meetings and conferences. With guidance from the Reproductive Health Access Project, Fellows will participate in advocacy projects that promote access to reproductive health care in family medicine. In collaboration with residents and faculty, Fellows will work on research projects with the goal of preparing presentations for academic meetings and publications for family medicine journals.

Our very first fellow, Honor MacNaughton (07-08), is now faculty at Cambridge Health Alliance and the Fellowship Director of our new Boston fellowship position. She recently looked back on her experience and shared with us what it meant to her.

“I chose to apply for RHAP’s Reproductive Health Care and Advocacy Fellowship because I was interested in both teaching in family medicine and getting trained to provide abortion care. I didn’t receive any abortion or ultrasound training in residency and the fellowship offered these concrete skills in addition to advocacy, leadership, and teaching skills.

I have carried all of what I learned during the fellowship into my current work: abortion and miscarriage provision, advanced contraceptive training, skills to train other providers, and the advocacy skills needed to negotiate the challenges of developing an abortion training program.

Beyond the fellowship, I continue to value the relationship I have built with RHAP to this day. I depend on the RHAP staff for their clinical expertise and technical assistance. And I look to the RHAP community for support when my work feels slow or isolating. Being a part of the RHAP community is reaffirming and inspires me to continue the work in my local community.”

Become the leader you want to be in reproductive health care and family medicine. Applications are being reviewed on a rolling basis. The deadline to apply is January 31, 2016. To find out more information about the curriculum, benefits, and how to apply please visit our fellowship page or email us at fellowship@reproductiveaccess.org.