The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) has awarded a new round of funding aimed at growing our own physicians by expanding existing Graduate Medical Education (GME) program residency availability to create new rural clinical training opportunities.
DHS has awarded grants to four hospital GME programs in this latest round of funding:
- The UW Addiction Medicine Expansion Grant will support an addiction fellowship for the next two years.
- An expansion grant to UW Rural Health Equity Track (RHET) will help sustain an increase of three new resident positions, for four years.
- An expansion grant to SSM Health Monroe Hospital helps continue two resident positions per year in Monroe’s Rural Family Medicine Residency Program.
- Aurora Healthcare Internal Medicine program’s grant will help support three internal medicine residents per year.
WHA spearheaded the creation of these matching grants based on their research-based “Grow Our Own” equation: a student of a Wisconsin high school or with other connections to the state who graduates from a Wisconsin medical school and completes a Wisconsin residency creates a significantly greater likelihood of the new physician remaining in Wisconsin to practice.
GME creation and expansion grants were created and implemented in 2013 and were so successful in forming public-private partnerships that the program was expanded at WHA’s urging to create Advanced Practice Clinician (APC) and Allied Health (AH) training grants.
Wisconsin’s strategic workforce investment—more than $56,000,000 in grants and matching funds to date—and the public-private partnerships formed as a result are paying off. Since DHS implemented the GME creation and expansion grants in 2013, the funding has supported 149 additional training residencies for Wisconsin physicians. When the pipeline is full, these additional residencies will graduate 54 additional physicians for Wisconsin each year.
Contact WHA Senior Vice President of Workforce and Clinical Practice
Ann Zenk with questions.