Title:
Rural Medical School Competes With City Life
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
Many rural areas in the United States have no
doctor. Some medical schools are trying different
ways to treat the problem. One idea is to educate
doctors in smaller communities and hope they stay.
Dr. William Cathcart-Rake heads a new program at the
University of Kansas in the Midwest. He says, "We
need more docs. There's somewhere like a quarter of
all of our physicians in Kansas are sixty years of
age or older. So we need to be replacing physicians,
too." He says medical students from rural areas now
typically study in Wichita or Kansas City, two of
the biggest cities in Kansas. "They say, 'You know,
I really have every intention of coming back to
rural Kansas,' but they meet a soul mate, they get
married, their soul mate happens to be from a big
city and we never see them again." The program is
based in Kansas' tenth largest city, Salina, home to
about fifty thousand people. Salina is about a
three-hour drive from Kansas City, past fields of
corn, soybeans and cattle. Student Claire Hinrichsen
grew up in a town of about six hundred people. One
reason she likes the Salina program is because of
the size. There are only eight students -- the
smallest medical school in the country. Classes are
taught by professors in Salina or on a video link
from Kansas City or Wichita. Students who complete
the four-year program will then do their residency
training in a small community in the surrounding
area. One place a resident might work is the Clay
Center Clinic, where Dr. Kerry Murphy is a family
physician. Dr. Murphy says, "This is a clinic that
has currently eight doctors and four mid-level
practitioners and we cover, of course, this town,
but we also have satellite clinics in two nearby
towns. We just kind of operate as a what I call a
'cradle-to-grave operation.' We deliver babies and
go all the way up to doing nursing home care." Rural
doctors generally serve older, poorer patients.
Going into a specialty in a big city can mean better
working hours and more money to pay off student
loans. The Salina program will pay tuition for each
year that students practice in a rural area in
Kansas. Dr. Cathcart-Rake hopes four years of
medical school and two years of residency will be
enough time to put down roots. In his words, "It's
going to be hopefully harder for them to break away
from those roots and go to bigger cities." For VOA
Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
