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Rural Health Information Hub
Rural Health Information Hub

Rural Project Examples: Graduate medical education

Effective Examples

Updated/reviewed October 2024

  • Need: General surgeons are needed in rural communities.
  • Intervention: Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is sending residents to complete a general surgery rotation in rural southern Oregon.
  • Results: 19 graduates of the rural residency program are currently practicing in a rural setting. The residents remain more likely than other OHSU residents to enter general surgery practice and to serve in a community of fewer than 50,000 people.

Other Project Examples

Added December 2024

  • Need: To train the next generation of psychiatrists in a rural context, while providing psychiatric care to an underserved region of West Virginia.
  • Intervention: A new rural psychiatry residency program at Marshall University, in which residents split their time between the rural town of Point Pleasant and the larger city of Huntington.
  • Results: The program welcomed its first class of residents in July 2024.

Updated/reviewed January 2024

  • Need: Hawai'i is experiencing a severe shortage of family medicine physicians.
  • Intervention: The Hawai'i Island Family Medicine Residency (HIFMR) program uses an interprofessional team-based approach so residents learn how to care for many types of patients in different healthcare settings.
  • Results: Since 2017, HIFMR has graduated a class of 3 to 6 Board-certified family medicine physicians annually. Most graduates have remained in the state to practice medicine; those who have left have entered fellowship programs and plan to return to Hawai'i Island to practice.

Updated/reviewed January 2024

  • Need: Dual platform to teach both plain language use and health literacy principles to health professions students and disseminate health information to rural populations.
  • Intervention: Writing project using community-specific public health data in order to write a plain language health education article suitable for publication in a rural newspaper.
  • Results: Since program start in 2017, over 60 students have successfully published their plain language health education articles in 17 rural newspapers in 3 states.

Added December 2023

  • Need: To address shortages of nurse practitioners and mental health professionals in rural Minnesota.
  • Intervention: The University of Minnesota (UMN) School of Nursing implemented a 40-hour rural rotation for students in the psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner program.
  • Results: 29 students completed rural rotations in communities across the state; several students voiced a new openness to practicing in a rural area after participating in the program.
funded by the Health Resources Services Administration

Added June 2023

  • Need: To improve maternal and birth outcomes in rural and underserved areas by increasing the number of family medicine physicians in these areas who have high-quality, evidence-based obstetrical care skills.
  • Intervention: The STRETCH-OB program trains a select number of family medicine residents at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford each year to provide high-quality maternity care, including surgical obstetrical care.
  • Results: The first two STRETCH-OB residents graduated in June 2023.
funded by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy

Updated/reviewed November 2022

  • Need: New Mexico's southwestern counties of Hidalgo, Catron, Luna, and Grant have experienced chronic shortages of primary care providers. New Mexico has the oldest physician population in the country.
  • Intervention: A comprehensive workforce pipeline program, including programming for middle and high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, primary care program students, and medical and dental residents.
  • Results: The program reaches over 1,000 school-aged students throughout the service areas and provides support for students and medical residents in a variety of healthcare-related programs for rural rotation experiences. FORWARD NM received its designation as an Area Health Education Center (AHEC) in 2012.

Updated/reviewed October 2022

  • Need: Primary care physicians in the rural areas of Wisconsin.
  • Intervention: A GME collaborative was created that provides leadership, technical assistance, and support for expanding rural graduate medical education in Wisconsin.
  • Results: The collaborative expanded rural graduate medical education opportunities which now include over 20 rural training programs. There are several residencies and fellowship opportunities in specialties ranging from family medicine to surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, psychiatry, and more.

For examples from other sources, see: