Welcome to the Web Site of the Department of Family and Community Medicine of the Penn State College of Medicine. We are located in beautiful Hershey, Pennsylvania. You may be aware of the other fine product made in our community, the Hershey Bar. The Milton S. Hershey trust, in fact, made the initial donation to Penn State University that made it possible for all the students.

Our department has a long and proud history in Family Medicine education. In fact, we were the first department of Family Medicine in an academic health center in the United States!

Our faculty members are very active clinically, seeing patients at University Physician sites in the surrounding Hershey, Harrisburg, Palmyra, Middletown, Mechanicsburg, and Elizabethtown communities, and in State College, home of our parent university.

We are also responsible for the education of our College’s medical students in Family Medicine, including a required third year clerkship and other courses. Our student body has an active Family Medicine Interest Group (FMIG).

The Penn State/Good Samaritan Hospital Family Practice Residency Program is located in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, about ten miles from Hershey. Residents do rotations at both locations, benefiting from both community and university hospital-based education.

The department is the home for the Pennsylvania Area Health Education Center (AHEC) program, which allows health professions students to do rotations in underserved areas around the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We also play a very active role in Penn State’s Generalist Physician Initiative, through the Penn State Center for Primary Care.  We also are the home for the PA Agromedicine Program.

I encourage you to explore our associated web pages and links, and to call us if you have any questions.

James M. Herman, M.D., M.S.P.H.
Chair, Family & Community Medicine

Did you know that our Department of Family and Community Medicine was the first of its kind in an academic organization in the United States?  Click here (video-1, video-2, video-3) to watch a series of videos of Thomas L. Leaman, M.D. founding Chair of our Department, describing the founding of the Hershey Medical Center and our Department of Family and Community Medicine.

(All three videos combined equal one hour total running time.  Videos will open in a separate media player window and will take a few minutes to load)