Published: October 13, 2009 05:08 pm         

NEW: Okla. program aims to put doctors in rural areas

STILLWATER, Okla. (AP) — A new program at Oklahoma State University’s medical school is designed to place doctors in rural areas by grooming students from small towns to return home.

Charity Holder, 23, a second-year medical student at OSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, is among the first students to join its new rural health option program.

“I am here to become a rural doctor,” said Holder, who is from Coalgate, a town of roughly 2,000 people about 115 miles southeast of Oklahoma City.

Part of the medical school’s mission has long been to send doctors to areas outside of larger cities. The new program provides additional training and rural medical experience to students opting for a that career path, said Dr. William Pettit, the school’s associate dean for rural health.

“We’re getting kids from rural Oklahoma and nurturing them to go back home as primary care physicians,” he said.

Pettit said the trend among OSU graduates and in the nation is the same: the number of medical school graduates who enter primary care residencies has dropped significantly. At OSU, 79 percent went into primary care in 1977, compared to 55 percent this year.

Mary Hurley Hospital, a small-town critical access facility, paid $160,000 for Holder to go to school and return to serve Coalgate as a family physician.

“It is like I was meant to be here,” she said.

Holder said she’s aware that the pay will be significantly lower than that of a big city specialist and that the hours will be long.

“Some doctors want to work a 9-to-5 job, and you don’t have that in a rural area,” she said.

The local physician, Dr. Richard Helton, often sees up to 100 patients per day, and Holder said it was his example that helped lead her to medical school.

Holder’s family operates a cattle ranch in southeastern Oklahoma, and she said she doesn’t want to give up the rural live for a city.

Holder said Helton is nearing retirement and that she hopes to be able to step into his shoes.

“The doctor in my town is so loved in the community and everyone respects him,” she said. “As long as I can remember I’ve always wanted to be just like him, the town hero — a small-town doctor.”

Holder likely will spend part of her third year and all of her fourth year completing medical school in Durant, Enid or Tahlequah, three towns where OSU has family medicine residency programs.

The one drawback that Holder sees in returning home to practice is that, eventually, patients can no longer be healed.

“Everyone in that town is like family,” she said. “My teachers, friends and relatives, I’m going to have to watch these people die. I’m going to have to tell them they have cancer. That is hard to think about.”

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Information from: Tulsa World, http://www.tulsaworld.com