Who will join me in practice? Recruiting for rural communities

Facilitator Lesson Plan

The Recruiting for Rural Communities Teaching Kit contains all you need to host your own team-based active-learning event featuring work by Randall Longenecker, MD, Professor of Family Medicine and Assistant Dean for Rural and Underserved Programs at the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, in Athens, Ohio.

One reservation sometimes expressed by students considering a rural residency or residents considering a rural community for practice is the fear of being the only one. What if the other resident in a class of two is someone with whom I don’t get along? What if I join a group of older physicians in practice and within a few years they retire leaving me by myself? As apparently difficult as it is to recruit physicians to rural practice, who will join me? This presentation explores ways of addressing that fear and creating an alternate future.

NOTE: Consider inviting a local health system recruiter to co-facilitate or lead the in-session interaction.

If you have questions about how to use or to adapt this teaching kit to your setting, contact us to schedule a phone call. We are happy to go over the details. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

1. With confidence acknowledge the reality that underserved places, which includes rural communities in general, are challenged in recruiting new physicians
2. Describe at least 3 strategies in addressing the fear of being one of only a few in an underserved practice
3. Articulate at least 3 tactics for recruiting others to join you, and for lessening isolation in practice and thriving there