St. Luke’s Graduate Medical Education department recently secured two high-level grants to educate and train a new generation of physicians specializing in rural medicine.

The funds, issued by HRSA, will prepare physicians for practice in small-town settings and help strengthen rural communities who have difficulty accessing health care services.

St. Luke’s secured $3.25 million in federal grants to support rural health efforts.

These grants will further enhance the existing family medicine rural residency training program and help establish a new and novel psychiatry rural residency training program. St. Luke’s GME researched the availability of these grants with specific rural regions in mind, namely Carbon and Schuylkill counties and areas surrounding St. Luke’s Miners, Carbon and Lehighton Campuses and Geisinger St. Luke’s Hospital.

One of the two new grants designates $2.5 million over the next five years to expand the existing Family Medicine Rural Residency Training Track residency program in Coaldale, with plans to increase rural sites and telehealth services in additional St. Luke’s rural service areas.

The other grant, totaling $750,000, will be used over the next three years to start a novel Psychiatry Rural Training Track residency program to improve access to behavioral health services for underserved/rural populations, with a specific focus in areas surrounding St. Luke’s Miners, Carbon and Lehighton Campuses and Geisinger St. Luke’s Hospital.

“Only 11 health systems in the country were awarded the psychiatry rural residency grant, and our family medicine rural residency program is one of only 35 accredited programs in the U.S., and the only one in Pennsylvania accredited as an integrated rural training track,” explains J.P. Orlando, Ed.D., chief graduate medical education officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network. “These grants represent our continued commitment to educating health care professionals to meet the current and future health needs of our communities.”

Family Medicine Rural Training Grant

“Having more primary care providers in rural areas will not only enable us to provide the basics of family medicine, but it will also help our preventive care efforts, which often include education on diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, the benefits of healthy diet and exercise, the dangers of smoking, as well as cancer prevention and early detection,” says Tom McGinley, MD, FM-RTT program director.

“Above all, it will help us train young physicians with St. Luke’s values and standards and then keep them practicing here in our communities.”

The Family Medicine Residency Grant will be used to:

• Increase the number of residents in the program from six to 12.

• Increase the number of rural sites in the FM-RTT program from two to six.

• Extend and enhance the curriculum using telehealth services in relation to medication-assisted treatment, substance use disorder and opioid use disorder.

• Improve faculty development training

The $750,000 Psychiatry Rural Training Grant over the next three years will allow St. Luke’s Psychiatry Residency program to provide rural patients better access to critically needed behavioral health services. Recruiting will begin next year for the first class of residents beginning in 2022.

The Psychiatry Residency Grant will be used to:

• Establish a new Psychiatry Rural Training Track to train two residents per year.

• Improve access to behavioral health services for our underserved/rural populations.

• Build on the existing psychiatry residency program.

• Build a sustainability plan for the newly developed PSYCH-RTT to ensure the long-term viability of the program.

• Attract, train and retain more psychiatrists.

• Improve access to behavioral health services for underserved/rural populations.