Rural Project Examples Addressing Graduate medical education

OHSU Rural Surgery Training

Updated/reviewed October 2024

Need: General surgeons are needed in rural communities.
Intervention: Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is sending residents to complete a general surgery rotation in rural southern Oregon.
Results: 19 graduates of the rural residency program are currently practicing in a rural setting. The residents remain more likely than other OHSU residents to enter general surgery practice and to serve in a community of fewer than 50,000 people.

Updated/reviewed November 2025

Need: Primary care physicians in the rural areas of Wisconsin.
Intervention: A GME collaborative and technical assistance center that provides leadership, GME expertise, and support for expanding rural graduate medical education in Wisconsin.
Results: The collaborative expanded rural graduate medical education opportunities which now include over 30 rural-focused residency programs. There are several GME opportunities in specialties ranging from family medicine to surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, psychiatry, internal medicine and more.

Updated/reviewed June 2025

Need: To improve maternal and birth outcomes in rural and underserved areas by increasing the number of family medicine physicians in these areas who have high-quality, evidence-based obstetrical care skills.
Intervention: The STRETCH-OB program trains a select number of family medicine residents at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford each year to provide high-quality maternity care, including surgical obstetrical care.
Results: Four STRETCH-OB residents have graduated as of June 2025 and all have cesarean section privileges in their practice.

Updated/reviewed April 2025

Need: To address shortages of nurse practitioners and mental health professionals in rural Minnesota.
Intervention: The University of Minnesota (UMN) School of Nursing implemented a 40-hour rural rotation for students in the psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner program.
Results: 29 students completed rural rotations in communities across the state; several students voiced a new openness to practicing in a rural area after participating in the program.

Added December 2024

Need: To train the next generation of psychiatrists in a rural context, while providing psychiatric care to an underserved region of West Virginia.
Intervention: A new rural psychiatry residency program at Marshall University, in which residents split their time between the rural town of Point Pleasant and the larger city of Huntington.
Results: The program welcomed its first class of residents in July 2024.

Updated/reviewed January 2024

Need: Hawai'i is experiencing a severe shortage of family medicine physicians.
Intervention: The Hawai'i Island Family Medicine Residency (HIFMR) program uses an interprofessional team-based approach so residents learn how to care for many types of patients in different healthcare settings.
Results: Since 2017, HIFMR has graduated a class of 3 to 6 Board-certified family medicine physicians annually. Most graduates have remained in the state to practice medicine; those who have left have entered fellowship programs and plan to return to Hawai'i Island to practice.

Updated/reviewed January 2024

Need: Dual platform to teach both plain language use and health literacy principles to health professions students and disseminate health information to rural populations.
Intervention: Writing project using community-specific public health data in order to write a plain language health education article suitable for publication in a rural newspaper.
Results: Since program start in 2017, over 60 students have successfully published their plain language health education articles in 17 rural newspapers in 3 states.

Updated/reviewed November 2022

Need: New Mexico's southwestern counties of Hidalgo, Catron, Luna, and Grant have experienced chronic shortages of primary care providers. New Mexico has the oldest physician population in the country.
Intervention: A comprehensive workforce pipeline program, including programming for middle and high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, primary care program students, and medical and dental residents.
Results: The program reaches over 1,000 school-aged students throughout the service areas and provides support for students and medical residents in a variety of healthcare-related programs for rural rotation experiences. FORWARD NM received its designation as an Area Health Education Center (AHEC) in 2012.