Meeting the Primary Care Needs of Rural Illinois
By Angela Black
Access to quality health care should not be something that disappears the farther one drives from the city. According to an article in the Economic Research Service September 2009 issue of Amber Waves, Carol Jones Senior Economist at USDA’s Economic Research Service, has found that “rural households have less access than urban households to affordable, nearby, high-quality health care.” Many rural Americans must travel long distances just to visit the doctor because rural communities have difficulty attracting and retaining health care providers.
The Illinois Farm Bureau addresses this physician shortage with two programs aimed at meeting the primary care needs of rural Illinois.
Started in 1948, the Rural Illinois Medical Student Assistance Program (RIMSAP) has been helping place doctors in rural communities for more than 50 years. RIMSAP, which is sponsored by the Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois State Medical Society, assists medical students facing barriers to their medical education at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
Students who are Illinois residents may be eligible to receive recommendations to the University of Illinois and have the option to take out a low-interest $30,000 loan. In exchange, recipients must practice in a primary health care field in an approved rural Illinois community for up to five years, depending on amount of assistance given.
Eligible residency fields include: Family Practice, Internal Medicine, OB-GYN, Pediatrics, Combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, General Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery, Emergency Medicine and Psychiatry. Since its inception, more than 800 students have received recommendations and/or loans.
Since 1992, RIMSAP has also been awarding scholarships to nurse practitioner students in Illinois through the Rural Nurse Practitioner Scholarship Program. Nurse practitioners are registered nurses who have additional training, which allows them to provide health care services similar to physicians. The $4,000 award is available to students who are Illinois residents, registered nurses, and already accepted to a university nurse practitioner program. Scholarship participants agree to practice for two years in one of the state’s approved rural communities.
For more information on either of these programs, contact Mariah Dale-Anderson, (309) 557-2350 or mdale-anderson@ilfb.org, or visit www.RIMSAP.com
In many ways we are reverting back to the era prior to the Hill Burton Act in the 1946. One of the largest problems facing the government related to health care then was access to quality health care. Truman, working off the legacy of FDR, had the Hill Burton Act approved by congress in order to stimulate the increase of Hospitals in rural America.
By all accounts the program was a success, and for years more and more rural hospitals were founded and new physicians felt the calling to return to their communities and live the calling of providing care to their communities.
As we matured into the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the era of the local hospital began to wane as the continual squeeze of margin out of health care put the smaller institutions at significant risk. One of two fates awaited them; aggregation into larger conglomerated hospital systems, armed with policy manuals that squeezed and revised the local practice of medicine to its most fiscally focused art while consolidating and eliminating costs, or closure. For the most part both results accomplished the same thing -leaving rural residents devoid of personalized care and often poorer outcomes. Rapidly the family practice physician left family practice and the patient became a mere statistic.
Thomas Loker
http://www.loker.com
http://tloker.wordpress.com
By: Thomas W. Loker on 08/12/2011
at 11:32 am