Rural Residency Planning and Development Program - Yamhill County, Oregon is a HRSA-designated rural area in the northwestern portion of Oregon. Designated as a Medically Underserved Area and Health Provider Shortage Area for medical, dental and mental health care, residents in this area have a long-standing need for increased access to health care services. As with community health centers across the nation, Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center (Virginia Garcia) has difficulty recruiting and hiring physicians for our rural clinics in Yamhill County. The lack of physicians has reduced our ability to serve patients, and according to HRSA’s National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, the dearth of physicians will worsen. They project a national shortage of 43,200 family medicine physicians by 2037. By developing a sustainable family medicine rural residency program, Virginia Garcia will increase the number of physicians in Yamhill County. When the program is in place, it will support six residents in each class. The first three years, alone, will total 18 family medicine residents. Yamhill County residents struggle with a long list of chronic conditions exacerbated by a higher incidence of tobacco use, rising substance use disorders and unaddressed mental health concerns, according to the Yamhill County Community Health Needs Assessment. Primary care clinics are key in supporting people with chronic conditions and in helping to prevent conditions from becoming chronic. Our project will help train residents interested in family medicine by basing them in our rural primary care clinics. Virginia Garcia takes a patient-centered, whole-person approach to health care, and our residents will graduate with a strong understanding of this approach. They will work with populations suffering from diabetes, hypertension, asthma, cardiac conditions and other chronic diseases as well as acute conditions, learning how to address symptoms while understanding the additional complications and barriers for their patients who have low incomes and live in rural areas. Oregon is among the states with the fewest rural residency programs in the nation. As such, our program qualifies as a HRSA funding priority 1 under geographic destination.
