The University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine in Chattanooga and its valued hospital partner Erlanger Health have launched a rural residency track in family medicine at Erlanger Bledsoe Hospital in Pikeville, Tennessee.
The Family Medicine Residency Rural Track aims to improve health care in rural areas surrounding Chattanooga and adds to UT Health Science Center’s growing efforts to increase access to health care across Tennessee, particularly in rural communities where services may be scarce.
Tennessee ranks 44th in health outcomes nationally, due in part to the lack of easily accessible health care opportunities in rural areas. Rural Tennesseans often have limited access to primary care doctors, specialists, dental care, and even emergency services. Additionally, the CDC has found early death from the top five leading causes is more common among people living in rural areas.
“The establishment of family medicine training in rural environments surrounding Chattanooga has been a longitudinal goal of our founding Department Chair Dr. J. Mack Worthington,” said James Haynes, MD, professor and dean of the College of Medicine in Chattanooga. “This rural training program, our academic department, and the development of advanced primary care in our region really stand on his shoulders. Our college is extremely grateful to both Erlanger Health’s leadership and Erlanger-Bledsoe’s team for partnering with us to make this dream come true. We look forward to partnering with our system’s specialists to bring the highest level of health care to Bledsoe County and surrounding regions for decades to come.”
The new family medicine physician training program welcomed its first resident, Ryan Hall, MD, who will train under the leadership of Leslie Griffin, MD, Family Medicine Department chair in the College of Medicine in Chattanooga, and Steven Fox, MD, director of the Family Medicine Training Program. Erlanger Health’s Andrew Smith, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and a native of Pikeville, will serve as the rural training track site director.
Dr. Hall completed his first year of family medicine specialty training at Erlanger Baroness Hospital in Chattanooga. The bulk of Dr. Hall’s final two years of training will be at Erlanger’s 25-bed critical access hospital, Erlanger-Bledsoe. This training platform is located and designed specifically to train physicians for the complexities of delivering high-level care in rural settings. The program includes training in the full breadth of family medicine to include pediatrics, prenatal and women’s care, orthopaedic/sports medicine, cardiology, urology, pulmonology, and endoscopic procedures.
The Family Medicine Department received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to establish the rural track. Over time, the plan is to train two residents per year in the rural track affiliated with Erlanger-Bledsoe.
UT Health Science Center’s College of Medicine in Chattanooga has also joined with another UT System institution, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), to further address the lack of health care in the region.
UTC recently launched the Mobile MOC initiative, a mobile health outreach effort to support rural communities. Dr. Haynes is the medical director for the Mobile MOC program. Each month, the Mobile MOC is deployed to various locations throughout Southeast Tennessee, providing free health care to patients in need.
UT Health Science Center’s rural health outreach spans the state. Wendy Likes, PhD, DNSc, APRN-Bc, FAAN, FAANP, dean of UT Health Science Center’s College of Nursing, recently assumed the additional role of executive director and special advisor on rural health for the university. Among the university’s outreach initiatives:
- The College of Dentistry, in collaboration with the Tennessee Department of Health, leads a a five-year, $53 million project to increase access to dentists and dental care across Tennessee, with a focus on the rural areas with the most need. The Healthy Smiles Initiative includes increasing the size of dental and dental hygiene classes and operating clinical rotation sites in Union City, Bristol, Crossville, Kingsport, Knoxville, and Chattanooga for senior dental students under faculty supervision to treat the uninsured or underinsured.
- The College of Nursing leads several rural health outreach and education programs. The Tennessee Rural Nurse Scholars program offers additional training, financial support, and active learning experiences for eight rural nursing students at the University of Tennessee at Martin and four at the University of Tennessee Southern. The college also operates mobile health units to increase health care accesss in underserved counties.
- The Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology in Knoxville is using a Grand Challenges grant for a van that takes audiology, speech language pathology, and social work services on the road in rural East Tennessee.
“The rural residency in Chattanooga highlights the UT Health Science Center College of Medicine’s vision to support Healthy Tennesseans and Thriving Communities,” said College of Medicine Executive Dean Michael Hocker, MD. “We are not training the next generation of health professionals to be only in urban areas, but we understand the need to care for those with fewer resources throughout the state and the regions. Data shows that residents who train in an area are more likely to stay and practice in that area.”