"It's really my honor and privlege to introduce the class of 2013 to you now," says Dr. Peter Bates, interim dean of the Maine Medical Center/ Tufts University School of Medicine program. "Christopher Anderson - Chris, please come down. Chris is a resident of Bar Harbor, Maine and graduated from Univeristy of Maine-Orono. The second is Nicole Barbi, a resident of Cherryfield, Maine and a graduate of Harvard University. Third is Peter Benzinger. Peter is a native of Waterville, Maine and graduated from the University of Maine at Orono."
You might be noticing a trend here: Most of these students in this program are from Maine. Twenty of the spots, in fact, are reserved for Mainers.
Twenty-six-year-old medical student Bob Bruce grew up in the small town of Caratunk in Somerset County. "I know what it's like not having easy access to medicine. And we used to have drive either up to the Jackman health center or down to Skohegan to Reddington-Fairview which was about 45 minutes in either direction."
Now, Bruce sees an opportunity to give back to his state. "Honestly, I'm really, really, really excited to be able to practice in Maine. I am so excited with the people that I'll be working with and I'll be able to spend time in the best state ever."
Now, it might sound like Bruce would come back to Maine regardless of where he went to medical school. But sheer enthusiasm doesn't pay off tuition. And that's where the scholarships come in. Thanks to funding from the state, foundations and doctors, all 20 of the students from Maine will pay half of the tuition costs paid by Tufts medical school students. So that would be about $22,000 per year instead of $45,000.
Dr. Peter Bates lays out the thinking behind the program. "It's been shown in the literature. If you attract students to medical school who are from a rural state and if you give them financial aid and then you provide a high quality of education in a rural environment, they're much more likely to provide care in a rural setting than someone who might have trained in an urban setting."
If successful, the program will be able to help the only other medical training program in the state, the University of New England's School of Medicine, generate physicians to fill 200 vacancies in Maine.
The program serves the goals of Tufts University's medical school, too, says its dean of educational affairs Dr. Scott Epstein. "This gave us a wonderful opportunity to expand our class. The reason we wanted to do that was to respond to the societal imperative. The AAMC, the Association of American Medical Colleges, has projected that there will be a 30 percent shortfall in terms of physicians going forward in the future and so they've asked medical schools to expand their classes to train more medical students." Tufts medical school class size will now go from about 175 to more than 200.
One of these students is Kelly Pitts of Bel Air, Maryland. Because she's not from Maine she doesn't benefit from scholarships, But she graduated from Bowdoin College last year and liked the idea of studying in Maine again.
To get into the program, Pitts also had to be accepted by Tufts. She says she doesn't think she's missing out by being in the minority of students to go on the so-called 'Maine' track. "No, I actually think I'll be exposed to a lot more doing this program. Right now we're starting two weeks earlier than all the other students and we're getting the chance to get hands on experience immediately."
She's not kidding. On Tuesday, Pitts embarks on a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Portland to Van Buren to shadow a primary care doctor for the rest of the week.