Shortage of doctors in rural areas could get worse

The rural doctor shortage may be about to get worse, even as health-care reform brings more people into teh system and creates more demand for physicians. Fewer than 4 percent of recent medical school graduates say they plan to practice in rural areas, which have about 20 percent of the population and just 9 percent of doctors, January Payne of U.S. News & World Report writes.

To get more doctors to rural America, medical schools across the country are adopting a variety of rural medicine initiatives. Some send students to small towns to gain experience working with rural doctors hoping to change misconceptions, Payne reports. The University of Minnesota's Rural Physician Associate Program requires third-year students to spend nine months working with a primary-care physician in a small community.

Participation in such programs is no guarantee students eventually end up in rural areas. A 2008 review published in the journal Academic Medicine looked at six schools with rural medical programs and found just 53 to 64 percent of the 1,600 program graduates practiced in rural areas, Payne reports. Howard Rabinowitz, director of Thomas Jefferson University's Physician Shortage Area Program, told Payne on average a rural doctor will spend seven years in one community, which means five doctors are needed to make up for the work one would accomplish in an entire career in the community.

Schools are looking to improve rural doctor retention by targeting would-be students for their programs at a younger age, Payne reports. "For schools, that means having a presence online and identifying and working with feeder colleges and universities that can refer good candidates," Payne writes. Others are targeting students from small towns themselves, hoping they would be more likely to spend their career there. (Read more)

Laura Ungar of The Courier-Journal reports on "a program designed to bring more medical professionals to rural and under-served areas of Kentucky" and quotes Dr. Baretta Casey, director of the Hazard-based University of Kentucky Center for Excellence in Rural Health: “It’s going to be a crisis in 10 years.”