BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — With a lack of primary care doctors in under-served communities, the University at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine is offering scholarships to medical students with a promise of staying to live and practice medicine right here in Western New York.
7 News Senior Reporter Eileen Buckley met with a student who made the pledge and why this is so important to Buffalo.
“The community is great. I love being here,” declared Megan Cloutier, medical student.
Each Monday afternoon UB Jacob School of Medicine student Megan Cloutier comes to see patients at the Hertel-Elmwood Internal Medicine Center in north Buffalo.
Cloutier, a Niagara Falls native, is graduating from medical school at the end of this month but will continue her residency work for the next three years. She has been able to help pay for med school thanks to Western New York medical scholarships.
“It's really important to realize that this came from our local physicians and our local business leaders who said we need to keep our medical students in Western New York to be our next generation of primary care physicians,” explained Allison Brashear, dean, Jacobs School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.
With projected doctor shortages and underserved communities lacking primary care physicians, Dean Brashear tells me these scholarships are a way to get students to pledge to stay local once they become a doctor.
“There's about a 20% projected physician shortage in our area and this is one way that we can get medical students to come to stay and live, do the residency, and stay in Buffalo. The people who get these scholarships have to have at least five years committed after their training to practice in Buffalo and well, of course, once someone comes to Buffalo, they want to stay in Buffalo,” noted Brashear.
The UB medical student tells me thanks to this scholarship program, she now has the chance to map out her future as a doctor right here in Buffalo.
“I'm definitely excited to stay here especially doing primary care because it's so needed,” reflected Cloutier. “There are some patients that all their notes are just from hospital visits and they never come into see a doctor and get their problems managed until its kind of too late and end up getting admitted.”
The scholarship program is also designed to encourage Buffalo students to consider a career as a doctor with a future chance to reach underserved populations.
“One way we can improve the health of the communities and have more physicians in the community, that looks like the community — that is our goal to improve the health of the community and we can do that in one way by bringing more students from the region to stay here and practice in Buffalo,” responded Brashear.
Local doctors and UB have worked to continue raising dollars for the Western New York Medical Scholarships fund.
The scholarships are available to first-year medical students who graduated from a high school located in one of the eight counties of Western New York. Anyone can make a contribution to the program.
“We raised about $4 million and we gave out scholarships this year, we hope to give out many more. And really, part of what we want to talk about is how important this is because we want students to be able to stay here, and we want them to choose primary care. We need more doctors and we have more doctors retiring and we need to really make sure that we have that pathway to bring in a new generation of physicians,” replied Brashear.
