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Rural Primary Care Fellowship Program

Thank you for your interest in learning more about our Rural Primary Care Fellowship opportunity. Being a primary care provider in a rural area provides unique challenges and benefits and the fellowship is designed as an opportunity to support growth that comes with those unique components. The goal of the fellowship is to help support you and your integration into your community through projects, rural-relevant training, and financial support to permit time to navigate community needs in your area.

Components of the fellowship include leadership training, preceptor development, community engagement, and a community-based project. Each component is tailored to meet the goals of the fellow and we look forward to helping support your fellowship experience.

The Fellowship Experience

Leadership Training

  • Attend leadership seminar
  • Develop relationships with local community leaders
  • CME: Racial equity training

Preceptor Development

  • Serve as liaison and preceptor for UNC family medicine residents during their rural FM rotations
  • Precept residents at UNC’s underserved family health center once monthly
  • Attend and present at the NRHA conference with a UNC resident or student
  • Present at Family Medicine didactics on rural health topics
  • Serve as longitudinal preceptor for a Kenan Primary Care Medical Scholar

Community Engagement

  • Assist in Pipeline Projects through health career workshops for high school, Community College, and/or College students (1-2 times annually)
  • Attend NC Rural Day held in Raleigh each spring
  • Mentor learners in a community-engaged project in alignment with Rural Interprofessional Health Initiative
  • Learn and perform a community needs assessment – to be embedded in final project

Areas of Interest:

Maternal/Child Health

  • Achieve competency in care for mother-baby dyad in a hospital and clinic setting with labor and delivery and caring for antepartum, laboring, postpartum women and their newborns
  • Learn the procedural skills, including labor management, delivery management, and US diagnostic skills to best care for mom-baby dyads in a resource-poor setting
  • Establish a model which will allow a QI project to be performed to improve delivery of prenatal, postnatal or newborn care
  • CME: Participate in prenatal and newborn care in outpatient clinic, following continuity patients and work at UNC with Family Medicine and OB colleagues on labor and delivery

Hepatitis C

  • Achieve competence in medical management of Hepatitis C
  • Expand the hepatitis treatment program to rural communities
  • CME: Participate in Piedmont Health Service’s hepatitis management program

Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS)

  • Achieve competency in POCUS to enhance rural primary care (e.g., DVT screening, MSK diagnostics, skin procedures, and enhanced injection techniques)
  • Obtain certification to provide and bill these services as an FM physician as available
  • CME: Take part in Piedmont Health Service’s ongoing POCUS clinics, UNC’s inpatient procedure services, and attend intensive POCUS course through the mentorship of John Doughton, MD and Eli Tiller, MD

Procedural Skills

  • POCUS
  • Acute care skills: central lines, US guided paracentesis, thoracentesis, etc.
  • MSK: expanding experience in joint injections and sports medicine
  • GYN: colposcopy, endometrial biopsies, IUD insertion, transvaginal ultrasound, OB US
  • CME: Take part in Piedmont Health Service’s ongoing POCUS clinics and LARC clinics, UNC’s inpatient procedure services, and attend intensive POCUS course through the aid of various mentors

Behavioral Health

  • Develop more advanced behavioral health skills by working with the behavioral health team located in El Futuro, Wakebrook, and Piedmont Health Services
  • Learn the process of telepsychiatry, with goal to participate in a telepsychiatry Project ECHO

Salary and Benefits

Salary

Support for 0.1 – 0.3 FTE of your clinical salary (based on average rural FM salary of $155,000)

Benefits

  • Professional liability insurance
  • Contract negotiation
  • Professional Education: Up to $2,500 for CME-related expenses

For additional information, please contact Dr. Caroline Roberts or Meredith Bazemore.

To be considered for a Rural Fellowship in Primary Care, please complete the application.