WWAMI’s Rural Underserved Opportunities Program gives students a taste of small-town medicine

Patient intake, treating runny noses, removing moles, even delivering babies — it’s all on the table this summer for Idaho WWAMI students participating in the medical school’s Rural Underserved Opportunities Program (RUOP).

RUOP participants, who have just finished their first year of medical school at University of Idaho, disperse across the state for four weeks of hands-on training and a taste of small-town medicine.

Sydney Mena of Idaho Falls and Kaden Lee of Nampa knew what they signed up for, but when they arrived in Rexburg in eastern Idaho this summer, they had no idea just how immersive the RUOP program would be.

“Oh my gosh, it’s been fantastic,” said Mena, who is studying under Dr. Jacob Curtis at Grand Peaks Medical. “It’s only been two days, but it’s been the best clinical experience of medical school so far. It feels like I’m finally practicing medicine, which is a fantastic change.”

On her second day, Dr. Curtis had her help deliver a baby, which she said was “the experience of a lifetime for me.”

“I was joking with Dr. Curtis afterward and was like, ‘Wow, you pulled me in for this delivery and let me help deliver a baby on day two. What do you have in store for me for the rest of the four weeks?’” Mena said.

After only a couple days on the job, Lee had also already seen lots of patients and helped with procedures like biopsies, colonoscopies and repairing lacerations.

“It’s a great opportunity for me to establish some foundations in things that I will use throughout my medical education,” said Lee, who is under the tutelage of Dr. Michael Packer at Madison Memorial Hospital. “For example, most family medicine physicians don’t do surgery, but if I do biopsies and repair simple lacerations, that’s a transferable skill that will go into my surgery residency.”

WWAMI’s goals with RUOP are twofold: to provide students with early exposure to the challenges and rewards of working with rural and underserved communities and to encourage students to consider a future in rural and underserved community medicine.

Data show that Idaho WWAMI is succeeding in keeping more doctors in the state. To date, more than 900 physicians have been trained in Idaho WWAMI and 51% of its graduates return to practice in Idaho, well above the national average of 39% of students returning to the state in which they went to medical school. Of those Idaho WWAMI graduates, more than a fifth of them, the most of any medical field, specialized in family medicine.

Dr. Curtis, who is a family medicine physician and OB/GYN, said RUOP offers students a chance early in their education to envision a rural career.

“It gives them a little taste of light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “Like a lot of careers, to become a physician, it is a lot of hard work, a lot of 80-hour weeks and a lot of sacrifice, and so it’s nice to have experiences like this, where you can get a taste of what life might be like when you’re a physician.”

When it comes to practicing medicine in a rural setting, one of the challenges is that health care providers might not have everything they need at their fingertips, so they must learn to think on their feet.

“It creates a different mindset around medicine when you don’t always have the specialist who you need to call. It cultivates an attitude of needing to continue to learn and grow,” Lee said. “That’s a really important skill to have — being able to figure things out.”

On the other hand, one of the benefits Mena has seen of a small-town practice is the ability of doctors to be able to see their patients from cradle to grave — and to get to know people outside of work as well.

“It’s amazing to me that Dr. Curtis can deliver a patient’s baby, and they’re still his patient, and their child is now his new patient, and he gets to see that child grow up,” she said. “He’s also such a force in the community. He really gets to know his patients well. That kind of primary care is unique to a small rural town, like, ‘Oh yeah, I know you, and I took care of your parents, and I see you at church, and I see you at school, and I see you at Little League.’ It’s just amazing to see what community you can build in a rural doctor’s office.”

Given Idaho’s major physician shortage, especially in rural areas, Dr. Curtis, who has participated in RUOP before, said one of the major benefits of the program is the connections students build in the small communities they’re serving.

“Hopefully they make that connection with a patient, see the variety of what we could do in the rural setting, and most of all, see the need there to perhaps persuade or inspire them to pursue such a career path,” Curtis said. “If they don’t, at least it gives them appreciation and understanding of what our care providers face and experience.”

Through RUOP, not only do students get exposure to daily life in a small-town health system, but the program is also a boon for doctors, as young people bring fresh ideas and new energy.

“I’ve been blessed that I haven’t really struggled with burnout in my 20-year career, but I think a lot of that is taking on medical students,” Curtis said. “You see their energy, their enthusiasm, their excitement. It’s an opportunity to give back and feel the enthusiasm of students. And it also keeps me sharp. If you’re going to teach, you want to be on the top of your game, too.”

Dr. Curtis said one of the things he hopes his mentees learn through their RUOP experience is how to humanize patients.

“We’ll see people having bad days and people who go through difficult things, and they realize that we’re not just treating symptoms, we’re treating patients. We’re treating the mind, the body, the spirit — it’s all interconnected,” Curtis said.

That lesson is certainly setting in for Mena.

“In school, you learn how a disease progresses or how the virus looks, but then we actually see this is a 4-year-old who was hospitalized with this disease and she recovered, but she’s still going to have issues with X, Y and Z,” she said. “It’s studying medicine with a human perspective instead of a book perspective. It’s real to me now. I see how it impacts people. It’s been really nice to see humans, people, patients with lives and experiences and hearing their stories.”