South Sunflower County Hospital physician Dr. Hannah Ray was a resident in the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s family medicine program in 2017 when she was assigned a round at the Indianola hospital.
It was her first trip to Indianola, but after a month of learning under the family medicine practitioners here, she knew it would not be her last.
“I just loved getting to see what they did,” Ray said of the SSCH and Indianola Family Medical Group doctors at the time. “I asked to come back for an elective rotation, and that was in the fall of 2017. I came back for a second month, and I felt like this would be a great place where I could actually, hopefully, make a difference and provide care to people who need it.”
Ray, along with SSCH administration, is hopeful that a new partnership with the EC-HealthNet Family Medicine Residency Program and the state’s first Rural Maternal Health Fellowship, will lead more doctors into full-scale family medicine and more physicians into rural areas like the Delta.
“I see it as a great opportunity to reach our rural parts of Mississippi, which is where we have more trouble with our outcomes because we don’t have as much on-hand medical care (and physicians who are) trained, equipped and comfortable with providing the resources our obstetrical patients need.”
Representatives from the Meridian-based residency program, along with SSCH administration and board members were on hand last week to announce the partnership that promises to bring fellows to SSCH and Wayne General Hospital in Waynesboro, the only two hospitals in the state where family doctors are delivering babies.
In fact, there are only three family medical doctors in the entire state who are delivering babies, according to Dr. Melissa Stephens, who is spearheading the state’s first fellowship program of its kind.
Stephens, who previously served as an associate dean at William Carey University, said that when she heard that number, compared with the maternal death rate and infant mortality rate data in Mississippi, she knew that something had to be done to provide better care in underserved areas of the state.
“As much as I loved my job at William Carey, I realized that’s not where I needed to be,” she said. “I needed to be in Meridian, Mississippi running a rural family medicine program and partnering with the people who are still out there doing this and are passionate about it so that we together can help people catch it. Because it is contagious.”
The fellowship hopes to recruit two to three fellows per year, each fellow already a graduate of a family medicine residency program.
“This is unique, because these are not people coming straight out of medical school,” Stephens said. “These fellows will be physicians who will have already completed three years of family medicine residency. They will have already graduated from a family medicine residency program.”
They will rotate between SSCH and Wayne General, learning from the remaining family medicine doctors in the state who are delivering babies.
“We’re going to teach them how to deliver babies, how to do great prenatal care,” Stephens said. “They will be board certified family physicians. Under the training of the ones doing it.”
Stephens said the main goal of the program is to train more Mississippi doctors in obstetrical medicine.
Hopefully, she said, hospitals like SSCH may better recruit those doctors to stay in communities like Indianola.
SSCH CEO Courtney Phillips said this could make recruiting family medical practitioners less cumbersome.
“This is going to be a gamechanger,” Phillips said. “This is going to open up the market…They’re going to have people in Mississippi doing it, and we’re going to have a relationship with them while they’re doing it.”
For doctors like SSCH’s Ray, rural medicine is a calling, and she is hoping more fellowship programs are started because of this, which could lead to more doctors in rural areas and better outcomes for patients.
“Up here, we need more doctors and more providers for our patients, and so it’s exciting to think about how this fellowship can maybe pull some more people in and pull them out to some of these rural areas where they can make a big difference,” she said.
The first fellows are expected to begin practice in 2024.
