The Rural Physician Associate Program, or RPAP, encourages University of Minnesota Medical School students to work in rural areas to gain professional experience, according to their website.
RPAP trains third-year University Medical School students to work in rural areas and understand the nuances that come with working with patients from rural areas, the Director of RPAP Kirby Clark said.
The program places students in cities in greater Minnesota and western Wisconsin, Clark said. Every medical student is required to have experience in a variety of fields of medicine, which RPAP allows students to do by working in clinics with different specialties.
“We match these students with these incredible doctors in rural communities. They’re so engaging and skilled and connected to their communities,” Clark said. “And the students see that they’re like, ‘I want to be like that person.’”
Clark said the program has been around for 54 years and was the first program of its kind. Since its conception in 1971, the RPAP program has been replicated all over the world.
Giving students the opportunity to study medicine in rural areas encourages them to return after completing their residency, as opposed to when students spend all 12 years of their training in metropolitan areas where they form relationships and plant their roots, Clark said.
“So what if we kind of whet their appetite during their training for a rural site and have them form some relationships there during this formative time,” Clark said. “So that’s what we do during their third year.”
Clark said about 42% of students who go through the RPAP program end up returning to rural areas after completing their education.
Austen Ott, an alumnus of the program for the 2023-24 term, said RPAP was a main factor as to why they applied to the University’s Medical School. They wanted to work in a rural setting while practicing family medicine.
Ott said they were placed in Willmar, Minnesota, about two hours outside of the Twin Cities, where they studied under two physicians in family medicine.
“I really got to see everything that a family physician could possibly do by working with the two of them,” Ott said. “And it was a great kind of day-to-day experience, because I would just follow whoever it was I was working with that day around.”
Ott said another benefit of the program was the ability to work with the same patients more than once and form a relationship with them, something uncommon in the medical school experience.
“I had the opportunity to see, for example, a patient who was seven or eight months pregnant when I first got there, and then she delivered her baby,” Ott said. “And then also I got to see her newborn over the course of that nine months.”
Ott said they felt the ability to work so closely with patients over and over again was a privilege to them as it led to unique opportunities.
“I felt very privileged to have that opportunity to be involved in that mom’s care because I had built up enough trust with her through our office visits,” Ott said. “And then also with the physician that I was working with, after working with him for several months, I was able to do a delivery all on my own, with him just supervising me.”
While Ott already knew they wanted to work in rural health care, they said RPAP only solidified that goal.
“After completing the RPAP program, I am very confident that I want to do family medicine,” Ott said. “I know that there’s kind of no other specialty that I would feel the happiest in. And I do want to go back to a rural area.”
Correction: The pronouns of Austen Ott are they/them, not he/him.