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Linda Hyman (continued)
"Linda maintains special relationships with the students," says Dr. Jay Erickson, a Whitefish physician and WWAMI's assistant dean of clinical affairs. He commends Hyman for providing more rural opportunities for Montana medical students that help the students become primary care physicians rather than specialists.
Hyman and Erickson collaborated to make changes in the WWAMI program.
"We looked at the needs of the state, current and projected, and found that it's the rural areas where there's the greatest need," Erickson says, adding that Hyman recognized that students from rural areas were more likely to commit to rural health careers.
Admittedly, that's been one of Hyman's biggest challenges.
"Our students are so idealistic and so excited about being physicians, serving the underserved, helping people," she says. "Then at the end of the pipeline, it's frustrating. Students all of a sudden have questions of income and lifestyle in rural communities. We want them to maintain the idealism, their reasons for wanting to help people and discover or rediscover rural Montana."
So she created more opportunities for WWAMI students to train in small communities. In the past, the students spent one year at MSU then three at the University of Washington. Beginning this year, Montana's students spend their second year in Seattle, but have the option of completing third and fourth years of medical school in Billings or Missoula.
We want (our students) to maintain the idealism, their reasons for wanting to help people and discover or rediscover rural Montana.
--Linda Hyman |
And it's been Hyman's zeal for the WWAMI program that has helped secure more state support for loan repayment to physicians who choose to practice in the most underserved areas of Montana. The Montana Rural Physicians Incentive Program now offers loan repayment of up to $100,000, up from $45,000 -- Montana students incur about $110,000 in debt by the end of med school.
A huge Montana map covers most of a wall in her office. There are the rivers she's floated, the streams she's fished, trails hiked with her golden retriever, Jake, but more importantly, the map reveals small towns where she and her husband Rick Baricos, a retired biochemist and pilot, have flown in their Cherokee 140, investigating rural Montana "for our summer vacation," she says. "We visit our students in Glasgow, Fort Peck and other small towns."
As she calculates the state's return on investment in students, she can show that 55 percent of Montana's WWAMI graduates practice medicine in state. She looks forward to the 2009 legislative session as a platform to present program expansion by adding funding for more students. If that weren't enough, she maintains a yeast genetics lab on campus in which her team investigates how cells adapt to microgravity in space.
And she calculates just how chilly the Madison River is likely to be in May with the next generation of WWAMI students.
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