In June, Mike and Gillian Goodrich gifted $10 million to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine toward a program to train primary care physicians in rural communities. Dr. Irfan Asif, chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine and associate dean of Primary Care and Rural Health at UAB, said the program will address shortages in primary care across the state.
“Alabama is in the bottom five, I would say, of states for primary care. If you look at all the rankings, we’re usually maybe 46 or 47 in the country in terms of the number of primary care providers for the population that we have,” Asif said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
“Primary care is meant to prevent and treat different conditions, things like diabetes, high blood pressure, making sure you get your cancer screening, making sure you get your immunization. If you don’t have somebody who’s working on trying to prevent diseases from happening, then you end up with a lot of disease. And in Alabama, we have a lot of disease here.”
More than 2.1 million residents, about 42% of the state’s population, live in rural areas, according to Alabama Public Health, and of those 16.4% are uninsured, compared to 14.1% of residents who live in urban areas of the state. State residents also have high rates of obesity (38.9% of rural residents are obese, according to the APH) and diabetes (14.2% of the rural residents, according to Rural Health Information Hub). High blood pressure, heart attack and mental health issues also are prevalent, Asif said.
“I would say that that is because you don’t have people in primary care,” Asif said. “I’ve been here at UAB for eight years, and what I’ve been trying to do is think about how we can address that shortage of primary care, and my hope is that (this gift) ultimately improves the health of this state or this region of the country.”
The Goodrich Rural Innovation in Training for Alabama, or GRIT, will primarily focus on expanding the healthcare workforce pipeline by attracting medical students and boosting the ability to train residents to be primary care doctors, Asif said. The goal is to train them in Alabama and keep them there, he said.
The issue is important to donors Mike and Gillian Goodrich. Mike Goodrich, a construction-firm executive, explained their goals in a statement. “For a number of years, Gillian and I have been concerned about access to quality healthcare in rural Alabama,” Mike Goodrich wrote. “Small-town hospitals are closing or reducing services to local citizens. We have worked…to develop a comprehensive program that will attract and retain primary care residents and physicians in rural communities.”
Providing medical students in the state with the tools they need to succeed can be the key to keeping them there, Asif said.
“Folks tend to stay close to where they last trained, and so typically more than 50% of people stay within 50 miles of where they trained last in medicine,” he said. “My whole philosophy is let’s recruit them from Alabama, let’s train them, and then hopefully retain them here in Alabama. That’s been working. We’ve hired a number of people in the past several years who’ve come out of this model.”
That philosophy requires scholarships, support for residency positions and improving access to technology and equipment within practices.
“(Residents) don’t want to train in a practice that has old, or maybe no, technology, or has you running paper charts and workflows from the ‘70s or ‘80s,” he said. “We want to have upscale practices, so when students go to those practices, they know what the future looks like. We’re trying to innovate with more technology, more telehealth programs, more remote monitoring for patients … to make sure that when students train there, they can see what that looks like, and then they want to stay.”
Anupam Agarwal, M.D., senior vice president for medicine and dean of the UAB Heersink School of Medicine, said the program is a partnership between the Goodrich family and UAB.
“From the start, the Goodrich family shared our concern about growing gaps in access to care across rural Alabama…we have built GRIT into a comprehensive pathway that supports learners from early exposure through training and into practice,” Agarwal said in a statement.
The workforce pipeline will begin before college, starting with high school outreach programs that introduce teens to health care careers. From there, undergraduate and medical school programs introduce students to the field of primary care. One program allows supervised medical students to work with patients during their first year of training.
“Students get to work with their patients over the course of four years,” Asif said. “We give them 10 patients, and they serve as health coaches, helping them with screenings, vaccines and any other health needs they may have, such as healthy eating or smoking cessation.”
By the time the students graduate, they’ve cared for the same patients for four years like they would if they were in primary care, he said. The program provides them with clinical skills, as well as soft skills like the intimate relationships with patients and their health, and the responsibility that comes with that.
Asif said GRIT will not solve the rural healthcare access crisis in Alabama single-handedly, but that it begins the process of getting more physicians into rural communities in the state.
And seeing that process begin is the gift’s purpose, Gillian Goodrich said.
“Small towns make up the fabric of Alabama,” she said in a statement. “We believe that this program is an exciting step to ensure rural Alabama will have the healthcare services that allow residents to continue to enjoy the benefits of rural life.”
The post Multi-Million Dollar Gift Will Address Rural Healthcare Workforce in Alabama appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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