Medical Education Is Good Medicine for Harlingen
education, heath care, medicine, regional academic health center,
When the Regional Academic Health Center, a campus of the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio, opened in 2002, it provided medical students from the Rio Grande Valley the opportunity to do clinical training closer to their families – an important draw in an area known both for strong family bonds and for being medically under-served.
The RAHC medical education division opened a pipeline of home-grown physicians. For Dean Leonel Vela, M.D., MPH, attracting third- and fourth-year medical students and internal medicine medical residents to the Valley for training has meant that the border region has been able to increase the number of physicians practicing in the community.
“A major determinant of where medical students stay to practice is where they complete their residency,” Dr. Vela says. “The number of our internal medicine residents who are staying in the Valley is around 60 percent. They’ve trained here, and they’ve stayed here to be community physicians.”
Since its inception, the RAHC program has recorded a high level of satisfaction from the medical students and residents in large part because of the quality of training they receive. Approximately 300 local physicians serve as the RAHC’s volunteer faculty. The students experience an unusually high level of one-on-one, hands-on teaching as they work under the supervision of Valley physicians. Now, Dr. Vela says, the new physicians have become junior RAHC faculty members and serve as role models for the medical students.
“It’s great to see them come full circle,” she says. “They can speak about their time here and how the RAHC prepared them.”
She points to Dr. Nolan Perez, one of the first RAHC Internal Medicine Residency program graduates and a Port Isabel native. He left the area to complete a gastroenterology fellowship in Detroit, yet he returned to practice in Harlingen and become a RAHC faculty member.
Dr. James Castillo is another example. After completing his residency, Dr. Castillo joined the hospitalist staff at Valley Baptist Medical Center Harlingen, the RAHC’s primary teaching hospital. He is now the medical director of the hospitalist program, which continues to attract newly trained specialists from the RAHC’s residency program.
Su Clinica Familiar, the public health facility where residents train adjacent to the RAHC, has also hired RAHC doctors.
As a medical student, Stephen Stewart was among the first to rotate through RAHC clerkships – the extended hands-on training program under the supervision of physician/faculty members – before earning his M.D. After completing a three-year residency in emergency medicine in Michigan, Dr. Stewart returned to Harlingen, where he is currently an emergency room physician at Valley Baptist Medical Center and, of course, a RAHC faculty member.
The future looks even brighter. Legislation passed in 2009 is positioning the RAHC to become a stand-alone medical school.
Story by Eileen Mattei
