Our namesake founder gave us the Wright start

Our namesake founder gave us the Wright start

The Wright Center was founded in 1976 as the Scranton-Temple Residency Program. Pioneering physician Dr. Robert E. Wright, a native of Archbald, Pennsylvania, led the startup and rallied community support. Dr. Wright and other early proponents of the physician training program were especially interested in developing doctors who would choose to practice locally. These community leaders foresaw the coming challenge in filling the slots of retiring physicians in Northeast Pennsylvania.

The residency program welcomed its first students on July 1, 1977. Its inaugural class consisted of six internal medicine physicians. In the decades since those trainees graduated in 1980, the program has blossomed into the largest U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)-funded Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education Safety Net Consortium in the nation. In 2010, the Scranton-Temple Residency Program’s board of directors voted to rename the organization in Dr. Wright’s honor. Read more about Dr. Wright and his still-unfolding legacy.

Training doctors, healing patients

In the nearly 50 years since its founding, The Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education has grown in size and scope to reflect the community’s – and the nation’s – evolving needs. It now trains around 250 resident and fellow physicians this academic year. All of its residency and fellowship programs are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Click here to learn about the programs.

The Wright Center’s learners train in hospitals and community-based settings, including the primary care practices operated by The Wright Center for Community Health. Its first primary care location opened in Jermyn in 1999. The Wright Center for Community Health now has multiple practices across a five-county service area in Northeast Pennsylvania, serving more than 31,000 patients annually. Click here to learn about its comprehensive health care services.

Training doctors, healing patients
Growing our community impact

Growing our community impact

Today, The Wright Center nonprofit enterprise is a physician-led organization with more than 650 employees. Its humble beginnings have not been forgotten. But it increasingly is active in the national health care arena, advocating for improvements to the medical education and care delivery systems.

In 2019, HRSA designated The Wright Center as a Federally Qualified Health Center Look-Alike. This designation and influx of federal resources allow The Wright Center to better meet community needs and expand access to affordable, nondiscriminatory, high-quality health care to the region’s residents, including those from rural and other medically underserved areas.

The Wright Center has primary care practices in Lackawanna, Luzerne and Wayne counties. Its integrated care model offers patients the convenience of going to a single site to receive medical, dental and behavioral health care services, including addiction treatment and recovery support services for substance use disorders.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Wright Center acquired a mobile medical vehicle called “Driving Better Health.” A care team uses the vehicle to extend primary and preventive services, such as immunizations, to historically marginalized and hard-to-reach populations, meeting patients where they live and work.

The Wright Center provides care to all patients regardless of income level or whether they are underinsured or uninsured. No patient is turned away due to an inability to pay. Eligible individuals may qualify, based on family size and income, for a sliding-fee discount program.

The Wright Center for Patient & Community Engagement, a subsidiary of The Wright Center for Community Health, was formalized in the 2020s. It focuses on expanding access to care and addressing the social and economic determinants of health – including food insecurity, homelessness and poverty – that can adversely affect underserved patients.

The Wright Center’s complementary organizations all are working in tandem to fulfill the enterprise’s mission. To read more about its mission, values and bold 10-year vision, click here.