Rural exposure: Med students practice giving care in the wild

What some students at the University of Washington Medical School did on their summer vacation was experience medicine, country style. The program intends to introduce students to the special joys and challenges of rural practice, in hopes of attracting new physicians to underserved areas.

By S.J. Komarnitsky, AMNews correspondent. Sept. 10, 2001.

After putting in eight hours at the local medical center, Stephanie Cooper was ready for some time off. But everywhere she turned, she saw patients. The woman to whom she administered a Pap test waved at her as she walked down the street. The teenage boy on whom she did a physical exam served her dinner at the restaurant. And the diabetic she had counseled just that day to take better care of his diet was at the bar downing a beer.

That's a taste of what Cooper, 30, a third-year University of Washington medical student, experienced this summer during six weeks in Wrangell, a town of 2,400 in Southeast Alaska. The town is so small that when two drivers stop on the road to talk it qualifies as a traffic jam.

Cooper is one of a hundred or so students from the Seattle-based school sent to practice medicine at rural and inner-city sites this year as part of an effort by the university to boost the number of doctors in underserved areas.

As the sole medical school in a five-state region, the University of Washington has made it a mission to recruit doctors to work in areas such as the rural communities that dot the western states. In addition to Alaska, students worked in Washington, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

The university hopes that the students' experiences in small towns and inner-city neighborhoods will encourage them to choose a career in those areas, or at least consider the option, said Tom Norris, MD, an associate dean of the UW School of Medicine. [...]