Three-year grant will support nationally and internationally recognized program

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The Department of Family and Community Medicine of Jefferson Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University has received a three-year grant from the Bureau of Health Professions (Health Resources and Services Administration, US Department of Health and Human Services) to expand its medical school educational programs. One of the five components of this expansion is to extend Jefferson’s rural Physician Shortage Area Program (PSAP) to the state of Delaware.

“The PSAP is a nationally and internationally known program which has been very successful in increasing the supply and retention of rural physicians,” said Howard Rabinowitz, M.D., professor of Family Medicine and director of the PSAP. “We hope that we can build upon Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with Delaware and expand this program to help the rural areas in the southern portion of the state, which desperately need primary care physicians.”

Since 1974 the PSAP has selected and educated medical school applicants who have grown up in rural areas or small towns – and who are committed to practicing family medicine in a similar area. The PSAP has enrolled five to ten students per class in recent years, and includes a strong mentorship component, along with rural clinical educational experiences.

The expansion of the PSAP into Delaware will focus on the two downstate rural underserved counties (Sussex and Kent), with a goal of providing at least two additional matriculants into the program each year. Working with its Delaware partners, the Delaware Institute of Medical Education and Research (DIMER), the University of Delaware, and the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Christiana Care Health System, Jefferson plans to help develop a pipeline for rural raised high school and college students, and to integrate the additional PSAP students from Delaware into the existing program.

Previous outcomes of Jefferson’s rural program, which have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), have shown that PSAP graduates are more than eight times as likely as their classmates to practice family medicine in rural and underserved areas, and their long-term retention rate is the highest ever reported. In addition, the PSAP has had a major impact on the rural physician workforce – accounting for 21 percent of all rural family physicians practicing in Pennsylvania who graduated from one of the seven allopathic medical schools in the state, despite the fact that PSAP students represent only one percent of those graduates.

“Most of our graduates who practice in a rural setting are professionally very satisfied and report a very good quality of life,” said Rabinowitz. “They like the small town feel, the sense of helping their community, and knowing most of their patients more intimately then a doctor in a large city.”

In order to achieve its goals, the grant includes:

1. Establishing a Delaware PSAP Advisory Committee and developing a formal plan to recruit and admit students from rural Delaware who are committed to practicing rural family medicine.

2. Expanding the PSAP Cooperative Program, which currently includes six Pennsylvania colleges and universities, to include the University of Delaware.

3. Having Dr. Rabinowitz and other Jefferson faculty visit the University of Delaware yearly to promote PSAP, meet with interested students, and work with its three Delaware partners to identify other strategies to increase the number of Delaware applicants and matriculants to the PSAP.

Planning for this expansion of the PSAP to Delaware will take place during the first year of the grant with a goal of matriculating at least two additional students from Sussex and Kent counties by the third and subsequent years. It is hoped that this will result in enrolling as many as 20 potential new rural physicians into the PSAP over the next decade, most of whom will end up practicing in downstate Delaware.