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Rural Medical School Competes With City Life

This is the VOA Special English Education Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http Many rural areas in the United States have no doctor. Some medical schools are trying different ways to treat the problem. One idea is to educate doctors in smaller communities and hope they stay. Dr. William Cathcart-Rake heads a new program at the University of Kansas in the Midwest. He says, "We need more docs. There's somewhere like a quarter of all of our physicians in Kansas are sixty years of age or older. So we need to be replacing physicians, too." He says medical students from rural areas now typically study in Wichita or Kansas City, two of the biggest cities in Kansas. "They say, 'You know, I really have every intention of coming back to rural Kansas,' but they meet a soul mate, they get married, their soul mate happens to be from a big city and we never see them again." The program is based in Kansas' tenth largest city, Salina, home to about fifty thousand people. Salina is about a three-hour drive from Kansas City, past fields of corn, soybeans and cattle. Student Claire Hinrichsen grew up in a town of about six hundred people. One reason she likes the Salina program is because of the size. There are only eight students -- the smallest medical school in the country. Classes are taught by professors in Salina or on a video link from Kansas City or Wichita. Students who complete the four-year program will then do their residency training in a small community in the surrounding ...