WARWICK — Kent Hospital will launch graduate medical training programs in emergency medicine and family practice this summer, making a leap into academic medicine that hospital officials say will improve the quality of care and attract new doctors to the state.

On July 1, the hospital will welcome doctors who have just earned medical degrees at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine and are ready to undergo residency training. Kent expects to fill six first-year and six second-year spots in a four-year emergency medicine residency and four spots in a three-year family practice residency.

“This is a huge day for Kent and for the community,” hospital president Mark E. Crevier said yesterday at a news conference at the hospital. He called the residency program “one of the most significant things this institution has done in the past 50 years.”

Because residents often stay to practice in the community where they have trained, the program will make it easier for the hospital to recruit new doctors to Rhode Island, officials said.

With young, questioning doctors at their elbows and new requirements to conduct research, the Kent doctors “will have to be on top of their game,” said Dr. Robert G. Dinwoodie, Kent’s chief of emergency medicine.

Additionally, the training program will make it easier for the hospital’s emergency department — the second busiest in the state, with 60,000 visits a year — to someday achieve its goal of becoming a Level II trauma center, a proposal linked to plans for the hospital’s parent company, Care New England, to merge with the state’s other hospital group, Lifespan. The trauma center designation comes from the American College of Surgeons, which sets staffing requirements that would be hard to achieve without residents on hand.

Even with the start-up costs, which included hiring two full-time faculty doctors, Crevier said that Kent would experience a net financial gain from the residency program because the federal Medicare program reimburses generously for medical education. The hospital has been struggling financially in recent years.

Dr. Polly E. Leonard, Kent’s chief of family practice and director of the graduate medical education program, said patients will notice little difference when the residency training starts. “There will be an extra set of eyes and an extra set of hands at the bedside,” she said.

That means better care, Dr. Robert S. Crausman, chief administrative officer of the state Board of Medical Licensure and Discipline, said in a phone interview. “In my opinion, the single best thing you can do for quality in a hospital is make it an academic hospital,” Crausman said. “Everything gets looked at twice.”

In affiliating with the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine, known as UNECOM, Kent will be training physicians with doctor of osteopathy, or D.O., degrees. Osteopathic physicians are one of two kinds of doctors licensed to practice in all 50 states. Doctors with M.D. degrees practice “allopathic” medicine. Crausman said M.D.s and D.O.s meet identical licensing requirements in Rhode Island; he called the differences between the two fields “largely historical.”

But a brochure from UNECOM said that D.O.s “give special attention to how the body’s nerves, muscles, bones and organs work together to influence health” and have a “whole-person philosophy of medicine.” Founded in 1978 in Biddeford, Maine, UNECOM has 500 medical students and 18 training programs throughout the Northeast.

The Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University trains allopathic physicians and has graduate medical residencies in several disciplines — including emergency medicine and family practice — at seven hospitals in Rhode Island.

Asked why Kent chose to affiliate with an out-of-state osteopathic medical school, Dr. John R. Audett, Kent’s senior vice president for medical affairs, said that years ago, when Kent approached Brown about a training program, Brown was “not interested.”

In 2001, Kent entered into a relationship with UNECOM under which medical students came to Kent for clinical rotations in family practice, internal medicine, surgery, emergency medicine and obstetrics. Moving to graduate medical education “seemed to me to be a logical next step,” Audett said. “You need to start somewhere and this is where we chose to start.” Audett predicted that if the merger goes through, at some point Kent will win approval for an allopathic training program with Brown.

Kent spent 15 months working on the accreditation process — “almost the speed of light,” said Dr. Kenneth Johnson, UNECOM’s associate dean for clinical affairs.

The hospital hired Dr. Clifford J. Fields to oversee the emergency medical residents and Dr. Jessica C. Manyan to lead the family practice residents. It had to meet standards, train faculty, pass inspections and ensure that its 25 clinical faculty were board-certified. Going forward, UNECOM will visit the hospital twice yearly, hold regular conference calls and ensure that doctors are up-to-date with medical knowledge.

Meanwhile, the questions from young doctors mastering their profession will provide “the proverbial pebble in the shoe,” Audett said, “that promotes lifelong learning.”

“This,” he said, “is what will make us the best we can be.”

ffreyer@projo.com