FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) will be able to graduate up to four additional medical residents a year.
This will be made possible by the ‘Rural Residency Planning and Development’ (RRPD) grant, a $750,000 federal grant from Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).
The RRPD grant will allow UAMS and local hospitals to develop a rural training track (RTT) for its family medicine residency program.
“This program will not only increase the number of residents in the state overall, it will increase the number of doctors in rural areas of the state,” said David Ratcliff, chief medical officer at Washington Regional Medical Center. “This will reduce workforce shortages overall and increase access to care for all Arkansans.”
Arkansas is a predominantly rural state with significant health disparities.
Forty-two percent of Arkansans live in rural areas, compared to 15% of the U.S. population.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rural Americans are more likely to die from the five leading causes of death than urban Americans.
Many deaths among rural Americans are linked to lifestyle issues, obesity, inactivity, and mental and physical distress and are potentially preventable, including deaths due to heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory disease, and stroke.
“It is essential that we expand Arkansas’s rural healthcare workforce and expand access to care in rural areas,” said Eric Pianalto, president of Mercy Hospital Northwest Arkansas. “Building the physician workforce in rural areas of north and Northwest Arkansas will provide much-needed medical resources for these communities and will improve health outcomes for the region and the state.”
UAMS has made Arkansas the third best state in the nation for retaining physicians trained in state. The vast majority (80.9%) of the physicians who complete both medical school and a residency through UAMS choose to stay in Arkansas to practice medicine.
Therefore, it is expected that at least 80% of the primary care physicians who complete the RTT in Carroll County will stay in the region to practice.
This will help increase the number of primary care physicians to meet the acute need and the increasing need as current primary care physicians retire.
The RTT will be connected to the UAMS family medicine residency in Northwest Arkansas and build on partnerships with Washington Regional Medical Center and Mercy Hospital.
The first two years will be spent designing the RTT and obtaining accreditation.
The first group of residents will start the program in July 2023 after an accreditation process.
Residents in the program will complete their first year at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville and spend the majority of the second and third year in Carroll County at Mercy-Berryville Hospital and rural Washington Regional and Mercy family practice clinics.
Ronald Brimberry, M.D., will serve as program director.
Brimberry served as interim director of the current family medicine residency program for one year, and as core faculty in the program for 20 years.
“This program is to help recruit and retain well-trained family physicians who will understand the needs of people in rural Arkansas communities and encourage these new family physicians to stay and practice in those rural communities,” Brimberry said. “We are very excited to have been awarded this federal HRSA rural residency development grant to get started on a new, fully accredited RTT opportunity for family medicine residency training.”
The UAMS family medicine residency program has not been able to grow to meet the needs of Northwest Arkansas for training and retaining family physicians in the region for many years due to a long-standing federal cap on funding to add resident training slots.
The HRSA grant will help alleviate that long-standing problem.
“The RTT program will allow the current UAMS family medicine residency program to expand opportunities for more elective training for all of our residents and provide better care to the citizens of Northwest Arkansas,” Brimberry said. “But most importantly, it specifically provides a dedicated rural training track for new residents to learn all about rural practice in Northwest Arkansas.”
Residents will receive rural inpatient experience, ambulatory clinical experience, and experience working at rural outpatient clinics, preparing them to serve in rural communities.
