SALINA, KAN. – The University of Kansas School of Medicine–Salina opened in 2011 – a one-building campus in the heart of wheat country dedicated to producing the rural doctors that the country needs.
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Now, 8 years later, the school’s first graduates are settling into their chosen practices – and locales. And those choices are cause for both hope and despair.
Of the eight graduates, just three chose to go where the shortages are most evident. Two went to small cities with populations of fewer than 50,000. And three chose the big cities of Topeka (estimated 2018 population: 125,904) and Wichita (389,255) instead.
But the mission is critical: About two-thirds of the primary care health professional shortage areas designated by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration in June were in rural or partially rural areas. And it’s only getting worse.
As more baby boomer doctors in rural areas reach retirement age, not nearly enough physicians are willing to take their place. By 2030, the New England Journal of Medicine predicts, nearly a quarter fewer rural physicians will be practicing medicine than today. Over half of rural doctors were at least 50 years old in 2017.
So Salina’s creation of a few rural physicians a year is a start, and, surprisingly, one of the country’s most promising.
Only 40 out of the nation’s more than 180 medical schools offer a rural track. The Association of American Medical Colleges ranked KU School of Medicine, which includes Salina, Wichita and Kansas City campuses, in the 96th percentile last year for producing doctors working in rural settings 10-15 years after graduation.
“The addition of one physician is huge,” said William Cathcart-Rake, MD, the founding dean of the Salina campus. “One physician choosing to come may be the difference of communities surviving or dissolving.”
The draw of rural life
By placing the new campus in Salina (population: 46,716), surrounded by small towns for at least 50 miles in every direction, the university hoped to attract and foster students who had – and would deepen – a bond to rural communities.
And, for some, it worked out pretty much as planned.
One of the school’s first graduates, Sara Ritterling Patry, MD, lives in Hutchinson (population: 40,623). Less than an hour from Wichita, it isn’t the most rural community, but it’s small enough that she still runs into her patients at Dillons, the local grocery store.
“Just being in a smaller community like this feels like to me that I can actually get to know my patients and spend a little extra time with them,” she said.
After all, part of the allure of a rural practice is providing care womb to tomb. The doctor learns how to deliver the town’s babies, while serving as the county coroner and the public health expert all at once, said Robert Moser, MD, the head of the University of Kansas School of Medicine–Salina and former head of the state health department.
He would know – he worked for 22 years in Tribune, Kan. (population: 742).
For another of the original Salina eight, Tyson Wisinger, MD, that calling brought him back to his hometown of Phillipsburg (population: 2,486) after his residency. His kids will go to his old high school, where his graduating class was all of 13 people, and he’ll take care of their baseball teammates. Plus, they’ll grow up living minutes away from generations of extended family.
“I can’t have imagined a situation that could have been more rewarding,” Dr. Wisinger said.