Study: Med schools can boost rural physician supply

A new study has found that if each medical school adds a rural training program, they would more than double the number of new graduates going into rural practice. The study's authors reviewed outcomes of programs designed to increase the rural physician supply and developed a model to estimate the impact of widespread replication. The study defined rural programs as those that focused admissions on candidates with a rural background or had an extended rural clinical curriculum of six months or longer. The study estimated that if each of the 125 allopathic medical schools committed 10 seats per class to rural training, the schools would produce 1,139 new rural doctors a year, or 11,390 physicians over a decade.