Second-year medical student Mason Bliss, who is learning for 10 months with mentor doctors at Memorial Regional Health in Craig, already has assisted in the Emergency Department following a serious vehicle crash and in surgery for a ruptured gall bladder.

Those are just some of the medical care situations Bliss has experienced in his placement since October in Craig as part of the Rural Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Bliss and Maddie Labor, with a placement in Steamboat Springs, are among 20 students participating in the competitive-based rural medical school program now in its 20^th year.

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“It really gives you incredible hands-on experience and the opportunity to actually practice medicine rather than just observing,” Bliss said of the rural placement where students learn and assist under volunteer preceptor physicians. “We may not be able to see things that are as extreme such as organ transplants, but we get a lot more hands-on experience.”

The Rural Program works to develop a pipeline of doctors where some 40% of participants later choose to serve in rural communities during their medical careers, said Dr. Mark Deutchman, professor and director for the Rural Program through Anschutz Medical Campus. Students seek out the Colorado program, which requires a second-tier application process, with 250 to 300 applicants for the 20 spots, Deutchman said.

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“We have students who apply to the CU School of Medicine because of the Rural Program because they know that we will foster and support their goals,” Deutchman said. “Our job is to give them experience and training so that they can figure out if it’s right for them. If they never lived or worked in a rural area, how do you decide if you are going to work there?”

Students and preceptors outlined a number of benefits to the program such as supporting lifelong learning for the mentor doctors, offering one-on-one learning for the students and providing patients extra time to speak with medical personnel with the addition of the students.

“We have relationships with rural communities and preceptors all around the state, so we tell these rural communities that our program is their farm team for their future medical staff, and they really embrace that,” Deutchman said.

In Steamboat, four doctors are participating as mentors including Evan Hardesty, Laurie LeBleu Vaszily, Patrick Johnston and Joshua Welch, Labor said. In Craig, Memorial Regional Health doctors Renee Carson and Matthew Grzegozewski are serving as preceptors.

The second-year medical students learn in the core areas of family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatry and emergency medicine.

Dr. Johnston, a surgeon at Steamboat Orthopaedic & Spine Institute, calls the Rural Program “invaluable” noting such programs “are essential for ensuring the long-term sustainability of high-quality health care in rural communities.”

“It provides students with a unique opportunity to experience and learn in a rural health care setting,” Johnston said. “This includes navigating resource limitations, understanding the specific health care needs of diverse rural populations and adapting their academic knowledge to real-world scenarios. By exposing students to the rewards of rural practice, we hope to inspire them to return and serve these underserved areas.”

Dr. Hardesty called the program “highly valuable to all.”

“They have no competition from other students or medical residents, so they get better exposure and access to specialists and procedures,” Hardesty said.

Labor has helped with deliveries of babies and cesarean sections. She recently had the opportunity to scrub in to help with a complex spine surgery where her role was to retract the tissue so the surgeon could see well.

Labor said she benefits from the program’s longitudinal clerkship structure that allows her to follow patients such as a high-impact recreation-related trauma situation where she saw the patient in the emergency room, scrubbed in for surgery to help stop internal bleeding, and followed up with the patient later in the hospital.

The model allows students to be involved in multiple fields of medicine simultaneously over time rather than in monthly blocks of different aspects, Deutchman explained.

Labor, a 2016 Steamboat Springs High School graduate, said she also had the opportunity to visit two local elementary schools to talk with students about health and medicine, which is not the norm in a large Denver-based placement.

Labor said working one-on-one with a physician and the hands-on opportunities create a strong responsibility for medical students to learn the information and content very well as opposed to being part of a group of four or more medical students at a larger urban center.

“There’s no hiding if I don’t know something, so I’m more responsible for the information,” Labor said.

Bliss, who grew up in rural Washington, said the program is aiding his goals to work in more underserved, remote communities specializing in public health and infectious disease.

Johnston emphasized the importance of community support for the rural med school program.

“We ask residents to be patient with our students as they learn and grow, knowing that their contributions will ultimately strengthen our local health care,” Johnston said.