WCMS Dean’s Dispatch

The University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine has had, from its very earliest days, a fundamental commitment to serving the healthcare needs of rural Nevada. A rural preceptorship for all fourth-year medical students was an early requirement in the curriculum, and continues to this day. It is often one of the most highly-rated clerkships in a student’s entire medical school experience.

As we return to our roots as a Reno-based medical school, we are committed to making our rural outreach more robust than ever before.

Here are a few examples of new rural programs and commitments:

• Project ECHO, a robust telehealth program in which expert medical specialists provide consultations and teaching to clinicians (physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants) in underserved rural communities to keep patients closer to home for specialty care.
• A telemedicine psychiatry program in which expert mental health care is provided directly to rural patients.
• The new Physician Assistant Studies training program that just recruited its first class of 24 students (out of 800 applicants!) who will start their education this summer and will have substantial clinical training in rural community medical practices.
• A federally-funded Rural Opioid
  Overdose Reversal Grant to train clinicians, first responders and emergency departments in rural communities in using naloxone that can save the lives of patients who accidentally overdose on narcotic pain medication.
• An application for a new program through our federally-funded Area Health Education Center (AHEC) called AHEC Scholars Program that will provide students in the early part of their undergraduate education in health-related fields with experiences in inter-professional collaboration. AHEC centers in Las Vegas, Elko and Reno will each develop a two-year curriculum for approximately 20 students each year.
• The support of the State Office of Rural Health and Frontier AHEC to our Department of Family and Community Medicine in Reno to create a new, accredited rural residency training track that will train two family medicine residents annually in Elko beginning this July. This is a remarkable partnership between the Governor’s GME Task Force that provided start-up funding for this new rural residency, the Renown Health system that provides funding and initial training before the residents move to Elko, the community of Elko, and Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital.

These are just a few of the ways UNR Med is keeping our commitment to serve rural Nevada as we work to improve health and healthcare across the state.