During the years that Benjamin Anderson worked in physician recruitment, he says they'd "roll out the carpet" when trying to draw traditional candidates to rural areas.
"We would show them all the nice homes and best teachers and the who's who, and avoid the ghettos and avoid the unsightly places, and make sure they didn’t see the underlying issues or the stinky, smelly places in town," says Anderson, who's now CEO of Ashland Health Center, a 24-bed critical access hospital, long-term care unit, and rural health clinic in Ashland, Kansas.
But over the past several months, Anderson has turned the traditional method of physician recruitment on its head, emphasizing his rural Kansas town's isolation and healthcare access issues in an effort to draw a different kind of physician: missionaries.
Anderson says the hospital is trying to tell mission-minded physicians that they don’t need to live overseas in order to help people in need.
"The person who's willing to live in a mud hut in the bush in Africa isn't bothered because they're two hours from a Starbucks," Anderson says. "Take exactly the opposite approach to recruiting a mission-minded professional as you would a traditional candidate."
When Ashland's only physician left a few years ago, the hospital was left with a single physician assistant, who worked practically alone for almost two years.
Anderson knew that something had to change. So he consulted with the faculty at Wichita-based Via Christi‘s medical residency program to develop the hospital’s current recruitment strategy: offering eight weeks of paid time off to physicians in order to allow them to complete mission work overseas.
For other employees, the paid time off ranges from four to eight weeks, depending on their contract and time of service, but any hourly employee starts with four weeks off.
Although employees can use their time off for anything they want, "these people here will use it for international mission work. But you don't just want to allow it," Anderson says. "You want to encourage it. You want to show that the same people that are working overseas in mud huts in Africa are people that can compassionately care for rural Kansans as well."
Despite some major differences between rural Africa and rural Kansas, there are similarities, too, such as a lack of access to care. But even though they're recruiting physicians who want to work in underserved areas, Anderson acknowledges that rural Kansas is not the third world.
"This can be one of the most comfortable places to live," he says. "We're simply saying that there are similar challenges between here and overseas and the same solutions apply."
Anderson also acknowledges what he calls "the elephant in the room:" recruiting missionaries to a tax-supported hospital.
"There were a couple of board members who had trouble with the idea of recruiting missionaries to a non-faith-based hospital," says Anderson, who is himself a Christian. But he insists that religion is kept out of the exam room and that "the boundary between faith and medicine…[is] not violated."
Anderson says Ashland's new recruitment model has promise for other rural areas—and he'll give the blueprint to anyone who asks for it.
He says the hospital has already recruited eight or nine people using this model, and they're still recruiting for other positions, such as a part-time physician and long-term care nurses. But it's not as easy as simply promising eight weeks off.
"It's about creating a paradigm that encourages service," he says. "The provider needs to find the mission in their work locally or they won't stay. That's the retention plan."
He also notes that members of the Millennial generation—those born after 1980—are often driven but by a desire to serve.
"If you look at recruiting the next generation of Americans, you want to look strongly at this model, because that’s what motivates them," Anderson says. He points to Via Christi, saying that 50% of the residents coming into this class are doing elective rotations in underserved areas.
"Not because they have to, but because they want to," he says. "33% of them are going overseas…what's being overlooked is that they can meet the same need by staying here, and going over there for a few weeks a year. And they can find the same mission right here at home."
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
