Get to Know Dr. Harsha Bangura and the Lakewood Rural Family Medicine Residency Program

Alex Harsha Bangura, MD, is a family physician at Lakewood Health System and the program director of the new rural family medicine residency in Staples, Minnesota. The Lakewood Rural residency program brings the total number of University of Minnesota family medicine residency programs to 10, spanning across Minnesota.

Nestled among beautiful parks, lakes and lots of recreational activities, the growing city of Staples is a little over an hour away from the fairly large city of St. Cloud. Residents will spend their first year of residency with Lakewood Rural's urban residency partner, North Memorial Family Medicine Residency Program, located in vibrant North Minneapolis. 

Looking ahead to welcoming the inaugural class in 2027, Dr. Harsha Bangura introduces herself and describes what makes Lakewood such a special residency.

What initially drew you to family medicine?

Family medicine was the only specialty that I could really imagine myself doing for my whole life because it's so diverse and the opportunities for practice are so broad. I'm also somebody who deeply values the ability to be flexible and adaptable to local community needs. So the idea of being able to be the physician for a community and meet people where they are, and take care of them across the lifespan, was really important to me. 

What do you love about working and living in Staples, Minnesota?

I love working in Staples. Lakewood Health System is an amazing organization, not least because of all of the wonderful people that I get to work with. I have an amazing community of family physicians who practice very broad spectrum family medicine every day.

I also have a wonderful community of supportive specialists who work closely with us to help take care of this patient population. I love living in Staples because it's a beautiful small community. My husband and I have a lovely place on a lake, and we get to enjoy nature and reasonably good access to recreational opportunities and to the metro area when we want to visit. I enjoy it very much.

What kinds of learning experience and curriculum highlights does your site offer residents?

The Lakewood Rural Family Medicine Residency is unique in the University of Minnesota system because we offer a longitudinal curriculum. For our residents, it's going to be a 2-2-2 program, meaning there's two residents per year. The first year will be spent rotating alongside the North Memorial Family Medicine residents in North Minneapolis.

The next two years, when residents are here in Staples, will be fully longitudinal. Residents are going to be exposed to what it's like to practice family medicine in a rural area, moving from one thing to another, just like we do in our day-to-day and in our week-to-week.

It's also going to be very OB-focused. We believe passionately that obstetrics is an important part of what family physicians can bring to a community to address maternal rural health equity problems. There are four of us on faculty who are privileged to provide C-section coverage, myself included. And we practice a rather high volume of obstetrics at our facility for our size.

We can also offer exposure to a broad range of specialists, which is unique to a rural area. We have a very well-respected healthcare system that has been able to recruit specialists at a volume that isn't super typical of a small independent healthcare system.

So we can provide a robust, broad-spectrum family medicine education to our residents and do it in a community that's exceptionally supportive of full-spectrum family medicine.

What are some other highlights of the clinic and hospital?

The Staples Clinic at Lakewood Health System is a very robust full-spectrum family medicine clinic. Our clinicians see everybody and provide basically all of the primary care in the system.

The healthcare system itself presents a unique opportunity to expose residents to rural oncology care. We have something called an oncology care home. It's a unique way of bringing patients who are seeking cancer care into a wraparound service. We have several oncologists as well as radiation oncology. This is a nationally recognized program.

We also have robust obstetrics opportunities, which is definitely a highlight of the program.

What makes this residency program a strong choice for those wanting to practice rural family medicine?

The practice of rural family medicine typically is more broad-spectrum than the average family physician in an urban area, simply because the needs are different and how the healthcare systems are structured. So when you come to our program, that's exactly what we're training you to do. We're training you to be competent providers in the emergency room, in the hospital, on the labor and delivery floor, and in the primary care clinic, and to do that in a way that is flexible. That means you aren't going to just be the ER doctor that day. You might also be providing some coverage to the labor and delivery floor, because that's real life. That's how our system is set up and how many systems are set up in terms of needing to be able to respond to the acute needs that occur on a daily basis.

So if you're interested in learning to be a family physician who practices at the top of the family physician license, who does all of the things that we conceivably can do, Lakewood is exactly where you want to be because that's what our physicians do. 

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I want to acknowledge that it's always a little bit nerve-wracking, this process of choosing a residency. And certainly choosing a residency that's in its infancy, being the inaugural class or one of the early classes of a residency can be nerve-wracking as well.

But I want to stress this: Assuming you're coming with the goal of learning to be the best family physician that you can be—and really stretch yourself to get all the skills you're going to need to be a community leader—this program is ready to help you do that and flexible enough to allow you to do that. 
 

Medical students can apply to the Lakewood Rural program in ERAS in September 2026 for an anticipated start of mid-June 2027.