The University of Kentucky College of Medicine has announced plans to create regional medical school sites in Morehead and Murray. The Rural Physician Leadership Track program is part of the university’s effort to recruit, train and retain future physicians in the state’s medically underserved rural areas.
The Morehead State University site will open in 2010, said UK President Lee T. Todd Jr. The Murray site could open as early as 2012.
The new program is part of a plan by the College of Medicine to increase class size by nearly 30 percent over the next several years.
After completing the first two years of medical school – consisting of rigorous training in basic medical sciences – at UK’s main campus in Lexington, rural track students will spend their third and fourth years at the Morehead site, which will work in cooperation with St. Claire Regional Medical Center to provide hands-on medical training.
Wayne D. Andrews, president of Morehead State University, said the program will give students from rural areas an incentive to remain in the state to practice medicine after graduation. A report issued last fall by the Kentucky Institute of Medicine found that Kentucky lagged more than 20 percent behind the national average for number of physicians relative to population. Kentucky has 213.5 doctors per 100,000 residents, compared to the national average of 267.9. The state needs an additional 2,298 doctors just to be on par with the national average.
That shortage is more acutely felt in the state’s rural areas, said Dr. Jay Perman, dean of the UK College of Medicine and vice president for clinical affairs.
“The shortage of doctors, particularly in primary-care roles, is felt especially hard in areas such as eastern and western Kentucky,” Perman said. “The university has a leading role to play in ameliorating this problem, which is both a health-care crisis and an economic issue.”
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