CONTACT: Virginia Snyder, 608-265-6770, vsnyder@wisc.edu
MADISON – Working as a physician assistant in her hometown of Darlington, Wis., gives Michelle Reisen-Garvey a wide range of authority that would be unusual in a city practice.
In any given day, she may see patients in clinic, follow them in the hospital, assist during surgery, cover a shift in the emergency room or even make house calls. She loves her job, and she also loves the community where she works.
“It sounds funny to say, but I like living in a community without a stoplight,” she says. “I appreciate small-town life – when someone has a problem here, everyone is there to help.”
A new, federally funded grant awarded to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Physician Assistant (PA) Program at the School of Medicine and Public Health is aimed at helping Wisconsin communities “grow” more physician assistants like Reisen-Garvey.
Rural areas such as Lafayette County, where stoplight-free Darlington is the largest community, often don’t have enough primary health care providers, nor do urban neighborhoods in cities such as Racine and Kenosha. Physician assistants generally work as part of a team with physicians but can perform many of their health care duties without supervision, allowing more patients to be treated.
“Because of existing and future health care needs, we’re trying to support primary care in communities where the need exists,” says Virginia Snyder, director of the physician assistant program, a part of the UW-Madison Department of Family Medicine. “As a program, we’re dedicated to meeting the family health care needs of Wisconsin.”
There are three major initiatives to the program. The first is to increase enrollment of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and from areas with a health care shortage. The second involves creating a “rural/underserved population” primary-care education track for students. The third creates “community partnerships” with underserved communities, to help identify potential students from those areas and to create more teaching sites within these communities. This will expose students and potentially interest them in careers in rural or underserved areas, particularly in primary care. This supports the mission of the UW-Madison PA program and the grant initiatives.
“This grant helps us create strong community connections, and, in turn, the communities can help identify their health care needs, and identify promising students who are committed to their communities,” Snyder says.
Snyder says that during the three years of the $581,000 HRSA (Health and Human Resources) Title VII Training Grant, the program hopes to create formal arrangements with 18 Wisconsin communities.
The first agreement was signed earlier this spring with the Cornerstone Project, an organization formed to provide health and wellness resources in these central Wisconsin communities: Berlin, Green Lake, Markesan, Princeton, Ripon, Wautoma and Wild Rose.
The community partners will meet annually with PA program representatives to evaluate recruitment, develop a rural health curriculum and establish training experiences in rural and underserved communities.
“The initial goal is to have our first student in clinical training at Wild Rose this fall,” Snyder says. “We eventually hope to have a preceptorship in each of these communities.”
Snyder says the PA program is working along with another UW-Madison program, the Wisconsin Academy of Rural Medicine, which trains medical students interested in rural health care and shares the goal of increasing access to health care in rural Wisconsin.
“We want medical students working alongside physician assistant students in order to build a team approach to family care,” she says.
Besides getting students out to experience health care in rural areas, the partnerships are also designed to help communities identify likely physician-assistant candidates.
That is what happened naturally in Darlington. Michelle Hauser was a local who returned to Darlington after earning her physician assistant degree at UW-Madison. She, in turn, recruited Reisen-Garvey, who had been working at the local clinic as a medical assistant. Reisen-Garvey initially earned a biology degree at UW-Platteville, before she was accepted into the Physician Assistant Program at UW-Madison.
Now the two Michelles – “we have one patient who calls us the ‘M&Ms,'” says Reisen-Garvey – are part of a practice with five physicians who see patients in clinics in Darlington, Shullsburg and Argyle. They also help train current UW-Madison students, such as Lindsay Wilkinson, a Dodgeville native who recently spent an eight-week rotation in Darlington.
Hauser, who also works in the UW-Madison training program as community education coordinator, says that exposing students to the variety of a rural practice helps sell some of them on the lifestyle. She knows the need is there.
“A lot of doctors in rural areas have been retiring and applications for family practice doctors are down,” she says. “I think physician assistants are going to have to fill the bill for many of these rural communities.”
Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of stories highlighting the Wisconsin Idea. For more, visit http://wisconsinidea.wisc.edu.
