Medical Training Programs

Teaching Tomorrow’s Healers

New Medical-Training Programs Meet Community, National Needs

With the nation facing an acute shortage of primary-care physicians, University Hospitals is stepping up to fill the gap.

One in five Americans live in areas where they do not have adequate access to primary health care because of a shortage of providers – especially in rural and inner-city locations. The nation’s current shortage of 16,000 primary-care physicians is expected to swell to 52,000 by the year 2025.

So in 2012, UH took steps to expand on its historic role of training future physicians, nurses, therapists, nutritionists, pharmacists, technicians and other professionals as part of the comprehensive teaching imperative embedded in our mission: To Heal. To Teach. To Discover.

In Cleveland, UH and Care Alliance Health Centers have developed a program, funded by the Saint Luke’s Foundation, to provide family-medicine residents with hands-on training in Care Alliance’s inner-city outpatient clinics. The program aims to attract to urban primary care a new generation of family physicians who are well-versed in the unique needs of underserved populations.

UH Geauga Medical Center and Lake Erie College in Painesville created a physician assistant (PA) program that will enroll its first class in 2014. PAs, practicing under a physician’s supervision, can perform many essential primary-care duties, including patient assessments, diagnosis and drug prescribing. UH Geauga Medical Center is helping design the college’s PA curriculum, and will serve as a principal site for the hands-on training.

These new opportunities complement dozens of other UH health care-training programs. UH Case Medical Center is the primary affiliate of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. In postgraduate medical education, UH Case Medical Center and UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital train more than 900 physicians each year in 76 specialty residencies and fellowships - residencies so competitive that nearly 11,000 new doctors applied for 155 openings in 2012.

UH Richmond Medical Center, a campus of UH Regional Hospitals, provides osteopathic medical education. And every year, UH provides hands-on clinical training to more than 2,000 aspiring nurses and of students of pharmacy and allied health professions such as physical therapy, speech therapy and medical assistant.

“We help prepare the next generation of health care clinicians for Northeast Ohio,” says M. Steven Jones, President of UH Geauga Medical Center. “We see it as an investment in our future. It’s great for us to be able to train and then hire the very best providers at UH.”

“It’s great for us to be able to train and then hire the very best providers at UH.”

M. Steven Jones