The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has recently awarded Pacific’s School of Physicians Assistant Studies with a five year grant of $979,671. The funds will be used to implement a rural healthcare track that benefits both military veterans and underserved communities.
Assistant professors AJ Sommers and James Ferguson co-authored the grant with help from program director and professor Judy Ortiz.This grant will assist in training assistants, as well as provide care for underserved communities. This rural healthcare track is part of the Physician Assistant Training in Primary Care Program and five students will be accepted into it each year.
Ortiz says that with the grant the goals of the school are to recruit military veterans, recruit students from rural areas and to teach students about rural medicine.
“Pacific’s PA program has had military veterans in it since day one, but it has never gone out of the way to recruit them,” said Ferguson. He also added that when the PA profession began in the 1960s it catered to military medics because they could apply their medical skills learned while serving their country. This grant aids in encouraging the recruitment of veterans back into PA education.
With the help of this grant This rural healthcare track not only allows the PA program to recruit military veterans, it allows for the recruitment of individuals interested in serving underserved areas, interested high school students and people like nurses or lab assistants who are already working in the medical field.
Students in the healthcare track program will do their clinical rotations in rural communities in need of healthcare. The program will be piloted in Harney County, where the majority of students will complete their clinical rotations.
Ortiz said there is a real shortage of providers in rural Oregon and that many physicians in those areas are going to retire soon. Harney County’s has a dispersed population of about 7,500 people and has only seven medical providers. While on their clinical rotations students will gain medical experience by providing care to residents in the county under the supervision of Burns-based medical doctor Tom Fitzpatrick.
The School of Physician Assistant Studies had already planned on doing a rural health care track and was working with Fitzpatrick prior to receiving the grant. Ortiz said Fitzpatrick was invested in the idea to help train PAs, and that he was the best person to partner with for this program.
Pacific’s School of Physician Assistant Studies produces about 40 certified physician assistants annually and focuses on primary care for underserved and rural populations. Based off a 2011 Pacific University Physician Assistant graduate survey, more than 32 percent of Pacific’s PA graduates surveyed currently work in a medically underserved area compared to 15 percent nationally, according to the 2009 National Physician Assistant Census Report.
Sommers said doing this rural health track is something we wanted to do that fits our mission, and it validates what we feel so deeply about.
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