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AAMC Newsroom

Managing Editor
Scott Harris
sharris@aamc.org

Staff Writer
Elissa Fuchs
efuchs@aamc.org

Caring for Community: Medical Students Venture Into Utah’s Rural and Frontier Areas

Daniel Ward, a third-year medical student at the University of Utah School of Medicine (UUSOM), recalls the paucity of healthcare professions information that was available to students at his high school, located in a community two hours north of Salt Lake City.

“The only information I remember receiving about medicine was given to me during annual career days, when my high school would recruit some semi-retired doctor to talk to us about what being a doctor entailed,” says Ward.

“To be honest, the only thing I remember one of the doctors telling us was that having anything more or less than ‘one bowel movement per day’ was abnormal. So, if this was my exposure to medicine at a semi-non-rural high school, I can only imagine what students at other schools were exposed to.”

Members of UROP with a hospital administrator in Gunnison, Utah.

Helping Hands: UROP volunteer G.J. Wilden (L) and founder Daniel Ward (R) flank a hospital administrator at a clinic in Gunnison, Utah.

Seth Spanos, another third-year medical student at UUSOM, had a similar experience during his high school years in a rural Utah community. “I came from an area where there was hardly any information available to students about the health professions,” says Spanos. “There was lack of resources, and most importantly, there were not many role models in my community.”

After volunteering in high school outreach programs at UUSOM, Spanos and Ward concluded that their personal experiences reflected a larger reality. “Seth and I realized that young adults living in the Salt Lake City area have much greater exposure to medicine than their counterparts living in more rural areas,” explains Ward. “We correlated this lack of exposure to information on medicine with the severe shortage of healthcare providers in rural and frontier Utah.”

Because of the lack of available healthcare providers in these areas, says Ward, many residents are forced to travel several hours to reach the nearest hospital, physician, or other types of medical facilities. With this in mind, Ward and Spanos founded the Utah Rural Outreach Program (UROP), an initiative designed to ultimately increase the number of physicians and other healthcare professionals in Utah’s rural and frontier populations.

The project aims to accomplish this goal by encouraging high school students to attend college and enter health careers, and by giving current medical students the opportunity to experience rural life, meet rural physicians, and contemplate careers in rural medicine. Approximately 40 students will be involved in the project, which officially starts this month with the group’s first visit to one of five high schools in Northern Utah. During these visits, medical students will serve as mentors to high school students, giving presentations on the health professions and medical careers, answering questions, and offering encouragement.

Students participating in the project will recruit rural and frontier physicians to serve as mentors for high school students in job programs. Another very important part of this program, according to Ward, will be medical students’ efforts to inform high school teachers and counselors about medical careers and educational opportunities.

“Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this is the lack of information that high school teachers and counselors have about health professions,” ponders Ward. “I think that one of our greatest tasks will be to educate the teachers and counselors so that they can better answer students’ questions.”

Considering current workforce concerns nationwide, programs such as UROP provide a much-needed service, Spanos acknowledges. “With the physician shortage in rural areas, programs that encourage rural students to enter medicine and return to their communities to practice will be very valuable,” says Spanos. “Hopefully we can build a program that can be successfully implemented in other areas of the United States as well.”