New Hanover Regional Medical Center and Southeast Area Health Education Center are collaborating to bring more family medicine physicians to the region.

The NHRMC and SEAHEC’s Family Medicine Residency Training program will add two resident physicians in each of the next five years, starting with the 2011 school year, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The two additional doctors will bring the program’s total to six, helping expand access to primary medical care, particularly among poor and uninsured patients in Southeastern North Carolina.

The growth of the program is supported through nearly $1.8 million in grant funding from the federal Affordable Care Act, which will invest more than $167 million nationwide in primary care residency expansion.

During the three-year curriculum, physicians training to become certified family medicine doctors will treat patients at the program’s home clinic at Coastal Family Medicine on Delaney Avenue, and will also rotate into clinic settings in the community and region to help increase access to care.

“We are very excited to be expanding our residency program. There is still a vast need for family physicians in Southeastern North Carolina and this will allow us to continue filling that need,” said Dr. Janalynn Beste, program director for the Family Medicine Residency Program in a news release. Beste is also an associate professor in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Department of Family Medicine.

NHRMC and SEAHEC have partnered on graduate medical education since 1972. After research in the 1990s documented a shortage of health care professionals in the region, the specialty of Family Medicine was added in 1996.

The program’s goal is to graduate specialists to practice in rural settings, particularly those in Southeastern North Carolina. Beste said the rural counties that make up New Hanover Regional Medical Center’s service area have a shortage of doctors, and most counties have poverty rates that exceed the state and national averages.

The program graduated 40 residents into the Family Medicine specialty.

The Coastal Family Medicine clinic logs about 13,000 patient visits per year. Almost two-thirds of its patients have Medicaid or no insurance. The additional doctors will allow the clinic to reach more patients who typically have limited access to a primary care physician, SEAHEC President/CEO Dr. Mark Darrow said in a prepared statement.

“We are happy to be recognized as a leader in the education of primary care physicians and are proud that our program has received this award,” said Darrow, who is also vice president for graduate medical education at NHRMC.

The Family Medicine Residency Training program “will certainly strengthen our efforts to train excellent doctors and deliver high quality health care to those who desperately need it in our area,” Darrow said.