HRSA Awards $20M to Bolster Rural Workforce, Residency Programs
Twenty-seven healthcare organizations received grants of up to $750,000 to increase the rural workforce in their area through new residency programs.
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By - The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) awarded $20 million in grants to increase the rural workforce through new rural residency programs, HHS recently announced.
Twenty-seven organizations in 21 states received up to $750,000 in Rural Residency Planning and Development Program grants to create new rural residency programs over the next three years that will earn accreditation through the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
“Promoting the health of rural America is one of the Trump Administration’s healthcare priorities,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in the announcement. “Supporting the training of healthcare providers in rural areas through grants like these is a key way to help expand rural access to care, and is part of an overall effort to support rural healthcare in sustainable, innovative, and flexible ways.”
The entire healthcare industry is already facing a physician shortage, with the Association of American medical Colleges (AAMC) projecting the industry to be short of up to 121,900 physicians by 2032. Finding physicians in rural areas is especially an issue for the healthcare industry.
Rural residents are five times more likely to live in a county with less than one primary care physician per 2,000 people compared to urban and suburban residents, UnitedHealth Group recently found.
The rural workforce challenge is likely to continue. New physicians are hesitant to work in sparsely populated areas. Just one percent of residents in their final year said they preferred to work in a community of 10,000 individuals or less. Another three percent said they would practice in a community with fewer than 25,000 residents, a Merritt Hawkins survey found.
“The health challenges in rural America are clear: rural communities face a greater risk of poor health outcomes than their urban counterparts,” said HRSA Administrator George Sigounas, MS, PhD. “Programs like the Rural Residency Planning and Development grants take aim at one of the most persistent disparities: access to high quality healthcare providers. HRSA is committed to increasing the number of providers serving rural communities and improving health in rural America.”
The Rural Residency Planning and Development Program is a multi-year initiative administered by HRSA’s Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) and the Bureau of Health Workforce (BHW). The program aims to expand the physician workforce in rural areas through new, sustainable residency programs in family medicine, internal medicine, and psychiatry.
The program offers awards to rural hospitals, community health centers, health centers operated by the Indian Health Service, Indian tribes or tribal organizations, and schools of medicine. The awards help recipients address the challenges of establishing rural residency programs, including securing sustainable funding and getting faculty support.
“We know that clinicians who train in rural settings are more likely to continue to practice there after they complete their residencies,” said HRSA Associate Administrator for BHW Luis Padilla, MD. “Rural communities are more likely to have a shortage of health professionals. The rural residency grants are one more way HRSA is helping to expand the health workforce and increase access to quality healthcare for these communities.”
In the latest round of awards, Delaware, California, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington received the largest number of grants. In each state, HRSA awarded two organizations for a total of nearly $1.5 million each.
Other states with healthcare organizations receiving a Rural Residency Planning and Development Program grant included Alabama, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maine, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
According to a recent Navigant analysis, rural healthcare challenges have impacted most of the states receiving grants. For example, the analysis showed that half of rural hospitals in Alabama are at high financial risk of closing. About 40 percent of hospitals in Georgia and Maine are also at risk of closing.
Over 100 rural hospitals have closed between January 2010 and the date of this publication, the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research reported.
