WVU Med School Tops in Rural Health Training: Ranks 9th in List By National Magazine

By Eric Bowen, The Dominion Post, Morgantown, W.Va.

Apr. 2–WVU’s School of Medicine broke into the Top 10 for best medical schools for rural health, officials announced Tuesday.

U.S. News & World Report

ranked WVU tied for ninth place in the specialty of rural health on its 2009 list of best medical schools. It is the first time WVU’s medical school has been listed in the top 10 in U.S. News’ rankings.

WVU President Michael Garrison said the ranking demonstrates that WVU is fulfilling its role as the state’s flagship institution. He said WVU has made a commitment to providing for the health care needs of state residents.

“We have some serious health care needs in this state that as a university we can help meet and achieve,” Garrison said. “We are the land-grant university. Our land-grant mission is to provide service to the state. This is a great example of how we do it.”

U.S. News uses a variety of criteria to evaluate graduate schools, said Hilda Heady, associate vice president for WVU Rural Health. The magazine takes into account the curriculum, the mission of the school and the impressions of officials at other medical schools across the country.

One measure where WVU has done extremely well is in the number of graduates who go into rural health care once they graduate, Heady said. Almost half of WVU’s graduates go into practice in primary care, and the number of primary care doctors from all state medical schools practicing in rural areas has increased by 200 percent in nine years.

Heady attributes the interest in rural health care to the university’s focus on serving state residents. West Virginia was the first state in the country to require all medical school students to do a rotation in a rural health clinic.

More than 1,000 students, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists and dentists, are expected to practice in rural clinics as part of their training this year, Heady said. The firsthand experience of working in small communities where health care workers are needed has encouraged many students to go back to those small towns after they graduate.

“The more that we can put primary care as close to home as possible and make that from individuals who are well-trained, then we have the long-term impact of trying to improve the health outcomes of people in the state,” Heady said. “The part of our curriculum that I think addresses some of those issues is that we require our students to engage in community service learning.”

WVU is doing well to make it to the Top 10, but Fred Butcher, interim vice president of WVU Health Sciences, said the school can go even farther. He said that he would like to see WVU continue to move up the list.

But Butcher said that more importantly, he would like to see WVU continue to improve care for rural residents of the state. He said WVU has tried to provide better access to doctors throughout the state with mobile doctors and a push to have more primary care doctors practicing in small communities.

“We cherish that lifestyle of being able to live in rural areas,” Butcher said. “As the state’s flagship institution, that’s part of our responsibility to help enable folks to practice in those wonderful small communities.”

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