North Country HealthCare residency program helping to alleviate doctor shortage
For more vulnerable populations in the state, such as those in rural, frontier and Native American communities, quality of life takes a heavy hit, as routine check-ups and ongoing care are difficult to obtain.
In these communities, the population-to-provider ratio is 3,896-to-1, an unfavorable ratio by standards set by the Health Resource and Service Administration.
In an innovative effort to begin to address this physician shortage, North Country HealthCare in Flagstaff launched a family medicine residency program on June 29, 2020, called The NARBHA Institute Family and Community Medicine Program.
The concept was to match both family medicine residents, or doctors in training, as well as pharmacy residents, to family and community medicine and pharmacy resident programs in the region, both part of the Colorado Plateau Center for Health Professions in Northern Arizona.
The hope is to plant roots in Northern Arizona that will serve communities here for generations to come.
“This is why we launched the family medicine residency program,” said Anne Newland, M.D., MPH and CEO of North Country HealthCare. “We need more primary care physicians in our region of the state, especially in the most isolated rural areas. Northern Arizona’s communities deserve to have access to the highest quality family practice physicians available; in short, we have no choice but to ‘grow our own.’”
The family medicine residency program currently has four residents, who have been training in clinical program development, teaching and research projects.
The momentum is building as four new residents joined the program March 24, and were introduced during a Match Day Zoom event, making for a total of eight first- and second-year resident doctors.
“Education has been a part of our story from the very beginning,” Newland said during the conference. “It’s a good marriage of training and mission to bring people into the safety net.”
Ed Paul, director of the Family Medicine Residency program, said 50 candidates had interviewed virtually for the program, with 45 making it to the final match list.
“We have a long history of developing this program here at North Country,” Paul said during the Zoom conference. “It’s more than just developing competent physicians, but what we call full-spectrum, to graduate physicians who really understand our needs locally. We’re on our way to do that.”
The four new family medicine residents include the following, who are all residents in full-spectrum family medicine, but have other focused interests as well: Tyler Hanny, D.O., from Gilbert, Arizona, who attended Midwestern University and has an interest in sports medicine; Rachel Christopherson, M.D., from Normal, Illinois, who attended Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and has an interest in women’s health; Jeff Quick, D.O., from Tampa, Florida, who attended Midwestern University and has an interest in sports medicine and behavioral health; and Erinn Gallagher, D.O., from Valparaiso, Indiana, who attended A.T. Still University, Flagstaff Campus and has an interest in community health and critical access medicine.
Residents have rotations throughout the service region of North Country HealthCare, including Coconino, Mohave, Navajo and Apache counties.
The program also has required rural rotations in Tuba City, Polacca and Whiteriver, making it the only graduate medical education program in the county with required rotations in Indian Country, providing training in Northern Arizona in what Paul called “real-world settings.”
Residents are also taught how to use “well-established outreach services” in the communities, he added.
Also announced during the Zoom conference were two new pharmacy residents who will be trainees in the PGY1 Community Pharmacy Residency at North Country, where two residents are trained in the community-based residency program each year.
“Community-based pharmacy programs are a small portion of residency programs,” said Kimberly Chen, BSPharm, who provided an overview of the program during the Zoom event. “There are more candidates than there are programs. The goal is to train practitioners who want to stay in the area where they trained.”
To date, 17 residents have entered the pharmacy residency program at North Country since it started in 2010, with accreditation in 2011.
This 12-month, full-time program provides an in-depth experience in the broad area of pharmacy practice in community and outpatient care settings. Residents are given a unique opportunity to work with medical and mental health providers, case managers and community health workers to provide whole-person care.
The two PharmD candidates for 2021 are Julia Goodin, from the University of Charleston School of Pharmacy, whose interests include ambulatory care pharmacy, diabetes management and anticoagulation, and Beth Stalker, from the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy, whose interests include ambulatory care pharmacy, critical care, informatics and toxicology.
In the next 10 years, a family medicine residency program will also have a “significant positive economic impact,” according to an economic impact study commissioned by North Country HealthCare and the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.
The study shows that increasing the number of physician residents at North Country HealthCare alone will result in 136 high-paying jobs and $151.7 million in economic output for Northern Arizona across a 10-year period.
“A residency program belongs to the community; it’s an investment in the community’s future,” stated a recent North Country HealthCare press release, the entity that serves as the medical home for nearly 55,000 people throughout Northern Arizona.
North Country HealthCare has established key partnerships, such as with The NARBHA Institute, which has provided $3 million across five years to support the residency program, as well as the Arizona legislature, which appropriated $750,00 to support the program in 2019.
Affiliated training sites include Flagstaff Medical Center, Hopi Health Care Center, Kingman Regional Medical Center, Little Colorado Medical Center, Tuba City Regional Health Care, Whiteriver Indian Hospital, and Winslow Indian Health Care Center. FBN
By Betsey Bruner, FBN
