Pub. 3 2019 Issue 1

W hen 15-year-old Kade Shumway Lyman told staff at San Juan High School that he wanted to be a doctor, their response was not the verbal high five he expected. It had been 10 years since a student from the Blanding, Utah, high school had gone to medical school, they told him in 2004, and it was an expensive and demanding ca- reer. Consider podiatry or becoming a physician assistant instead, was their advice. A small town midway between red-rock tourismmecca Moab and the desolate beauty of Monument Valley and the Navajo Nation territory, Blanding struggles with poverty and isola- tion. As a teenager, Lyman had to drive 90 minutes to Cortez, Colorado, just to buy a pair of socks. While now, more than a decade on, there are a few shops, other issues remain the same: with no specialist care, a serious medical problem still requires an AirMed flight to the University of Utah. Two years after Lyman shelved his physician plans, several University of Utah medical students visited Blanding to meet with juniors and seniors. They were volunteers with the Utah Rural Outreach Program (UROP), which recruits medical stu- dents to crisscross the state during the winter and spring breaks. Their mission is to address a long-standing dearth of doctors in rural counties by encouraging local high schoolers to consider the rewards of health care careers. According to health care advocacy nonprofit the Lown Insti- tute, about 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas, yet only 11.4 percent of physicians practice in rural locations. And while in 2016, Massachusetts had 134.4 primary care doctors per 100,000 people, Utah had only 64.7, marginally ahead of Mississippi with 64.4. One UROP volunteer visiting Lyman’s class was from the central Utah town of Beaver and had played football against San Juan High. Talking to him, Lyman realized that medical students were, he says, “normal people, not geniuses. All medical school takes is dedication and hard work.” Lyman, who became an MD in 2016, attended med school at the U, returning to Blanding himself as a UROP representative to promote medicine to students, including his little broth- ers, sister, and friends. “I felt like I could really connect with students there because I knew their teachers, all the doctors who were providing them care, and even other students they knew who had been able to get into health care,” he recalls. The idea behind UROP, he says, is that contrary to Thomas Wolfe’s famous dictum, you actually can go home again. While big-city residents might turn their noses up at small- town practice, a fifth-generation Blandingite like Lyman knows the beauty of rural life and the benefits of working in such locations: good money, a wide variety of procedures, and a broader scope of practice. Indeed, Lyman is a poster child for UROP. He, his registered- nurse wife, and their two small children currently live in Los Angeles, where he is a third-year resident at a Level 1 trau- ma center. He plans to return to Blanding as an orthopedic surgeon. “I want my children to grow up in the same close- knit and supportive community I did,” he says. From a small basement office housed in the U’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine building, longtime UROP advi- sor Bob Quinn (BS, 1986) keeps a watchful eye on the 17-year- old program, which runs on an $8,000 annual budget. In 2017, first-and second-year medical students visited 40 high schools in 15 different counties, accumulating more than 70 hours of classroom presentations for a total of 1,566 students. Medical students sign up for all sorts of reasons, ranging from wanting to go home for the holidays to seeing a national park. In late 2018, 40 students signed up to spend much of their winter break visiting as many high schools as they could in the state’s rural and frontier counties. That included two first-year students, Jen Christiansen and Kassie Amann. They picked visiting some of the state’s most isolated schools dur- ing a four-day road trip from Salt Lake City to the epic splen- dor of Monument Valley. Christiansen and Amann’s journey, in the latter’s silver SUV, with a cooler full of cow hearts and pig lungs in the trunk, revealed the challenges distance imposes on rural commu- nities and the importance of UROP in terms of encouraging students to pursue medicine. Christiansen summed up the trip’s meaning for her and Amann over a late-evening burg- er in a family-run diner. “I just want them to look at Kassie and me and know that, ‘No matter what I want to do in life, regardless of if that is medicine, it’s worth the work.’ ” By Stephen Dark Rural Roots Lower Calf Creek – PC: Dave Titensor www.UtahAFP.org | 34