Mississippi Today
A program is putting more doctors in rural Mississippi. The auditor says it needs improvements.
A program aimed at increasing doctors in rural Mississippi communities isn’t effective enough, a new report from the state auditor’s office says.
As health care worker shortages continue, the program’s success could be crucial to improving the state’s persistent health care crisis.
The Mississippi Rural Physicians Scholarship Program, established in 2007 by the Legislature and administered by the University of Mississippi Medical Center, awards money to medical school students for tuition or student loans. In exchange, recipients must spend one year practicing in Mississippi for every year they accept the money. A similar program focused on incentivizing dentists to practice in rural Mississippi followed in 2013.
Ideally, the programs would help close the state’s health care gap — half of all Mississippians live in medically underserved counties, according to a 2021 assessment from the state Health Department. Eighty of Mississippi’s 82 counties are federally classified as Health Professional Shortage Areas in either primary or dental care.
But according to State Auditor Shad White, the programs aren’t producing doctors and dentists fast enough. A former participant of the program, however, says it was never intended to solve the shortage entirely – the problem is too big and complex.
Data in the report show that the percent of need met for primary and dental care in Mississippi’s neediest communities has decreased over the past decade, despite more money being infused into the programs.
Fletcher Freeman, a spokesperson for the State Auditor’s office, said the programs, as they stand, are too small to be effective.
But participants like Dr. Jonathan Buchanan who moved home to Carthage in 2017 to practice family medicine said the programs are making significant changes in the communities they serve, despite the fact they are not solving the entire problem.
“I was the first physician to come back to this area in 26 years — that’s a generation’s worth of time,” he said. “Our program is currently somewhere in the 70 range of people graduated from the program and practicing, and if you asked each of those physicians, they’d say they’re making a tremendous impact on the quality of health care that rural Mississippians are receiving.”
The report takes issue with several things in particular: the programs’ definition of “rural” is too broad, and the commissions running the programs should maintain better oversight of them.
“We just don’t have the definition of ‘rural’ down,” Freeman said. “We’re using definitions when it’s convenient to potentially place doctors in Flowood.”
Though no participants have been placed in Flowood, the rules for the program allow for the Jackson suburb to be considered “rural” because of its small population. Currently, 10% of scholarship recipients practice in areas that the federal government doesn’t consider “rural.”
The report recommends adopting the federal definition of “rural” to ensure participants are placed where they’re most needed.
However, when the Legislature created the programs, they established commissions to oversee them. Those commissions decide how the programs work, including the definitions under which they operate.
Dr. Natalie Gaughf, the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs, said “it has been determined that the federal designation of ‘rural’ is not adequate” to meet the state’s needs, and what’s currently used is based on an “understanding of Mississippi’s current and historic health care landscape.”
Mississippi towns that have a population of less than 15,000 and are located more than 20 miles from a “medically served” metropolitan area are eligible for graduates to be placed for work, she said, and every practice location request is reviewed individually.
Students who aren’t from rural areas are also eligible to receive a scholarship, though Gauphf said that all of the program’s recipients have “substantial ties” to rural communities.
Additionally, the report found that a quarter of rural physician scholarship recipients and 14% of dental scholarship participants have breached their contracts.
That can mean students did not complete their commitment requirements, or they chose a non-primary care field of medicine or chose to practice in a non-rural part of Mississippi or out of the state entirely.
Breaching the contract should result in the scholarship being converted into a loan with interest. However, the report found that the scholarship programs’ offices do not accurately monitor this data. Gauphf did not expand on the challenges associated with tracking these numbers.
According to Gaughf, 49 medical school graduates have breached their contract from the time the program was created to the fall of last year.
Freeman couldn’t say what provoked the first-time review of the programs, aside from gauging their general effectiveness and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are being put to good use.
Since the program’s inception, more than $33.5 million in state dollars have gone toward it.
“This report was meant to highlight basically efficiencies and inefficiencies in the program to maximize every dollar they receive,” he said.
Freeman said if the offices use the report to address the programs’ deficiencies, perhaps they’ll receive more money and be able to make more of an impact. According to Gauphf, changes based on the report have already been made, including at least one new form used to track individuals who breach their contracts.
The Legislature has recently expanded both programs, putting $2.17 million into the rural physician scholarship program and $420,000 into the dentists’ program in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, according to the report.
“It’s a good program that’s effective at producing doctors,” Freeman said. “Just not at the rate we need them.”
Still, it’ll be hard for the program to keep up with the rate physicians and dentists are choosing to leave the state or retire, which Gauphf said is “faster than the programs can produce graduates.”
Buchanan, the scholarship program alumnus practicing in Carthage, sees the state’s health care worker crisis as multifactorial and not something that can be solved through a single program.
“We just don’t have enough physicians, period,” he said. “But I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1865
Dec. 24, 1865
Months after the fall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery, a half dozen veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK soon became a terrorist organization, brutalizing and killing Black Americans, immigrants, sympathetic whites and others.
While the first wave of the KKK operated in the South through the 1870s, the second wave spread throughout the U.S., adding Catholics, Jews and others to their enemies’ list. Membership rose to 4 million or so.
The KKK returned again in the 1950s and 1960s, this time in opposition to the civil rights movement. Despite the history of violence by this organization, the federal government has yet to declare the KKK a terrorist organization.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
An old drug charge sent her to prison despite a life transformation. Now Georgia Sloan is home
CANTON – Georgia Sloan is home, back from a potentially life-derailing stint in prison that she was determined to instead make meaningful.
She hadn’t used drugs in three years and she had a life waiting for her outside the Mississippi Correctional Institute for Women in Pearl: a daughter she was trying to reunite with, a sick mother and a career where she found purpose.
During 10 months of incarceration, Sloan, who spent over half of her life using drugs, took classes, read her Bible and helped other women. Her drug possession charge was parole eligible, and the Parole Board approved her for early release.
At the end of October, she left the prison and returned to Madison County. The next day she was back at work at Musee, a Canton-based bath products company that employs formerly incarcerated women like Sloan and others in the community facing difficulties. She first started working at the company in 2021.
“This side of life is so beautiful. I would literally hold on to my promise every single minute of the day while I was in (prison),” Sloan told Mississippi Today in December.
Next year, she is moving into a home in central Mississippi, closer to work and her new support system. Sloan plans to bring her daughter and mother to live with her. Sloan is hopeful of regaining custody of her child, who has been cared for by her aunt on a temporary basis.
“This is my area now,” she said. “This has become my family, my life. This is where I want my child to grow up. This is where I want to make my life because this is my life.”
Additionally, Sloan is taking other steps to readjust to life after prison: getting her driver’s license for the first time in over a decade, checking in monthly with her parole officer and paying court-ordered fines and restitution.
In December 2023, Sloan went to court in Columbus for an old drug possession charge from when she was still using drugs.
Sloan thought the judge would see how much she had turned her life around through Crossroads Ministries, a nonprofit women’s reentry center she entered in 2021, and Musee. Her boss Leisha Pickering who drove her to court and spoke as a witness on Sloan’s behalf, thought the judge would order house arrest or time served.
Instead, Circuit Judge James Kitchens sentenced her to eight years with four years suspended and probation.
He seemed doubtful about her transformation, saying she didn’t have a “contrite heart.” By choosing to sell drugs, Kitchens said she was “(making) other people addicts,” according to a transcript of the Dec. 4, 2023, hearing.
“I felt like my life literally crumbled before my eyes,” Sloan said about her return to prison. “Everything I had worked so hard for, it felt like it had been snatched from me.”
She was taken from the courtroom to the Lowndes County Detention Center, where she spent two months before her transfer to the women’s prison in Rankin County.
Sloan found the county jail more difficult because there was no separation between everyone there. But the prison had its own challenges, such as violence between inmates and access to drugs, which would have threatened her sobriety.
She kept busy by taking classes, which helped her set a goal to take college courses one day with a focus on business. Visits, phone calls and letters from family members and staff from Musee and Crossroads were her lifeline.
“I did not let prison break me, I rose above it, and I got to help restore other ladies,” Sloan said.
She also helped several women in the prison get to Crossroads – the same program that helped her and others at Musee.
Sloan credits a long-term commitment to Crossroads and Musee for turning her life around – the places where she said someone believed in her and took a chance on her.
Pickering, Musee’s CEO, said in the three years she’s known Sloan, she’s watched her grow and become a light for others.
The bath and lifestyle company has employed over 300 formerly incarcerated women in the past dozen years, but Pickering said not everyone has had the same support, advocacy and transformation as Sloan. Regardless, Pickering believes each person is worth fighting for.
When Sloan isn’t traveling for work to craft markets with Pickering, she shares an office with her Musee colleague Julie Crutcher, who is also formerly incarcerated and a graduate of Crossroads’ programs. She also considers Crutcher a close friend and mentor.
Sloan has traveled to Columbus to see her mother and daughter whom she spent Thanksgiving with. She will see them again for Christmas and celebrate her daughter’s 12th birthday the day after.
Her involvement with the criminal justice system has made Sloan want to advocate for prison reform to help others and be an inspiration to others.
“I never knew what I was capable of,” Sloan said. “I never knew how much people truly, genuinely love me and love being around me. I never knew how much I could have and how much I could offer the world.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1946
Dec. 23, 1946
University of Tennessee refused to play a basketball game with Duquesne University, because they had a Black player, Chuck Cooper. Despite their refusal, the all-American player and U.S. Navy veteran went on to become the first Black player to participate in a college basketball game south of the Mason-Dixon line. Cooper became the first Black player ever drafted in the NBA — drafted by the Boston Celtics. He went on to be admitted to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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