GREENFIELD — A small cohort of University of California, Davis (UC Davis) medical students is visiting Mee Memorial Healthcare System for five to six months out of the year through the Rural-PRIME system.
Rural-PRIME is part of the University of California’s “PRograms In Medical Education,” or PRIME, designed to produce physician leaders who are trained in and committed to helping underserved communities.
“The students primarily come from the communities that they will be serving,” said Dr. Noah Hawthorne, chief medical officer at Mee Memorial. “It provides much-needed clinical experience for medical students outside of an academic environment, and increases their exposure to our health system. Students can form lasting relationships with communities, hospitals, clinics and the physicians dedicated to enhancing health care in the region.”
The student rotations are taking place predominantly at Mee Memorial Healthcare System’s Albert and Donna Oliveira Clinic, a full-service primary care facility in Greenfield.
The program is being led by Drs. Alejandra Beristain-Barajas and Francis Rangel-Ventura, both family medicine practitioners, who are also graduates of the UC Davis Rural-PRIME system.
“This means that the program will be coming full circle,” Hawthorne said.
Rural-PRIME has been working to build out Central Coast primary care providers for the past 10 years in collaboration with UC Santa Cruz, whose post-baccalaureate work in science helps those considering medical school by offering the opportunity to round out their academic experience before starting their program.
UC Davis Rural-PRIME was created in 2007 to train future physician leaders committed to advancing health equity for California’s rural communities.
According to reports, 20% of the population in California lives in rural areas, but only 9% of physicians practice in rural settings. With these disparities, rural patients have poorer outcomes on several measures than their urban counterparts: higher levels of chronic conditions, higher rates of hospitalizations and higher rates of cancer deaths.
Rural-PRIME was developed to address the lack of access in rural areas and to reduce health care disparities in rural populations.
Key aspects of the Rural PRIME curriculum include:
- Additional education on topics relevant to rural communities, including rural public health issues, pesticide exposure, addiction medicine, rural law and more;
- Visiting community organizations located in or serving rural communities; and
- A minimum of 20 weeks during their clerkship year at sites located in California real communities.
Mee Memorial Healthcare System, based in King City, is the primary healthcare organization serving nearly 80,000 residents across a 50-mile stretch of southern Monterey County, from the agricultural communities of Soledad to Bradley.
