Program Trains Students for Rural Medicine Field
Published Jun 27, 2008
Providing small-town health care requires a special skill set. A program launched by Dr. John H. Haynes Jr. and based at North Caddo Medical Center in Vivian is working to ensure that interested physicians are trained to meet this important niche.
A practicing physician for more than four decades, Haynes began a rural family practice fellowship for medical students in the early 1990s, and in 2002 he grew the program to residency status associated with the LSU School of Medicine.
“We graduate two [students] a year through our programs; however, we have a number of medical students rotating through – nurse practitioner students and PA [physician assistant] students,” Haynes explains.
All of them gain hands-on experience at North Caddo, learning to provide diagnostic testing, obstetrics, cardiac stress tests, some surgical procedures and other services that physicians in larger markets hand over to specialists or technicians.
“Our primary problem is that we don’t have physicians in the rural areas. It’s not that we don’t have excellent doctors in the city, but we’re just without rural doctors,” says Haynes, who estimates that there are about 200 Louisiana small communities in need of a skilled and versatile family physician.
“Of course, graduating two a year will not ever take care of the numbers that are necessary, but I’m hoping that we can show that this program could be like a pilot program that could be copied and others will develop.”
Haynes’ program is the only one of its kind in the state, and there are fewer than 10 nationwide. He credits Shreveport-based Willis-Knighton Health System and its president and CEO, James K. Elrod, with the funding and support necessary to keep the program afloat.
“We take care of very sick people,” Haynes says. “So many times, the people at home in the rural area are elderly, and this allows them not to have to travel such long distances for diagnostic procedures.”
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
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