This is an interesting session in the sense that three groups of us submitted for hour-and-a-half sessions on different pieces of this entire pipeline of medical education as far as rural is concerned. Starting with admissions, going through medical student education, residency, and fellowship education, and on, continuing into the community. And then they asked us to combine three 90-minute sessions into one 90-minute session, so as we ran through this a couple weeks ago in Chicago at the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, it is fairly fast paced, so hang onto your seats. It really does hope to address a variety of the issues in the entire pipeline of medical education.

Rural physicians are best graduated through a continuous process

I think it is important to understand it as a continuous process. Too often in the educational world, we tend to segment things, and for an area as important and as specialized as rural health care delivery, it is important to recognize that we have to pay attention to all the pieces to have as successful a product. Tom may allude to it, but one of our cohorts and colleagues (Rick Blondell) when we presented in Chicago pointed out from the Louisville program that when they picked the best of the best and the ripe stuff, they are still only successful 50 percent of the time in achieving folks that go into rural practice. So we do need to focus on each of the segments, and that includes the community itself and education of the community to be receptive for the practitioner to understand the nature of the rural community. I think that we’ll let Tom Rosenthal from the University of Buffalo start with the pre-admissions and admissions data that we have, and we’ll run from there.

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