U of L’s Trover medical campus ranked among best for rural medicine education and addresing rural physician shortage

The University of Louisville School of Medicine Trover Rural Campus in Madisonville was rated third best in the nation for preparing medical students to practice in rural areas, which is critical to the state since most of Kentucky’s rural counties are considered to be short of health professionals.

“From the president and the deans to the individual faculty and staff,
our team has proven the value of a collaboration of a rural campus and
an urban university. The beneficiaries are our students and the rural
Kentucky communities who receive these new doctors who are well prepared
to care for them,” Dr. Bill Crump, right, associate dean for the Trover campus, said in a UofL press release.
  
The study by researchers at the University of Colorado, which will be published in Academic Medicine in August, ranked 35 programs across the nation and found that 62 percent of Trover graduates practice medicine in rural areas, says the release.

“This national recognition is the fulfillment of Dr. Loman Trover’s vision outlined almost 60 years ago of providing first class medical education in a small town with the goal of producing more physicians for rural Kentucky, and is a testament to the strong support we’ve had from the Louisville Campus over the past 15 years,” said Crump.

Nationally, there is a physician shortage in rural areas because only 3 percent of medical students report want to practice rural medicine, while 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas. This problem is especially large in Kentucky, says the release, since a majority of the state’s 59 counties classified as rural are considered to be short of medical professionals..

“Our Trover campus is vital to fulfilling this mission and especially critical now because our state faces such a significant shortage of physicians, especially in rural areas. Dr. Crump’s leadership of the program is one of the reasons for its success. We view the program as a model that has the potential to be implemented in other areas of Kentucky,” said School of Medicine Dean Dr. Toni Ganzel.