Dallas Morning News Examines Increase of ‘Home-Grown’ Medical Students Alleviating Border-Area Doctor Shortages

The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 22 profiled efforts in the Rio Grande Valley, an area along the Texas-Mexico border, to relieve a physician shortage by encouraging medical students from the area to practice there. Programs begun in the 1990s have aligned local border universities with state medical schools, offering scholarships, summer classes and mentoring to students living in the area aiming to cement a "local connection" that will "prove stronger than the problem forcing some doctors [in the border areas] to leave," the Morning News reports. Celia Flores-Feist, a pre-med mentor and chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said that students who grew up in the border region "saw the need [for doctors] every day." The programs offer college and medical school scholarships and help "overcome the cultural and economic barriers" that keep some students out of school and away from border areas, the Morning News reports. A 1994 alliance between Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas-Pan American resulted in the Premedical Honors College program, in which 60 border students have since enrolled. The model was replicated in 1999 when the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston established an Early Medical School Acceptance Program at four UT and Texas A&M University campuses along the border. The state Legislature last year approved a proposal to create a comparable program for poor students throughout the state among nearly three dozen state universities and eight medical schools. Many program recruiters target school children as early as the eighth grade and make an effort to "calm the concerns of traditional parents," who resist their children going away to school, the Morning News reports. Dr. Manuel Ramirez, a retired physician who directs his own "med-ed" program as part of the South Texas Border Initiative, said, "We're making progress that's unheard of. ... It's changing little by little" (Hastings, Dallas Morning News, 9/22).