Robert Bashford, a professor of psychiatry who has long worked to put doctors in rural North Carolina, will serve as associate dean of the new Office of Rural Initiatives.
After receiving a second round of money from the Kenan Trust, he has additional resources to advance his mission.
“We have received further generous funding from the Kenan Trust to put groups of inter-professional trainees and docs in these areas — that is, we’ll combine the doctor with the social worker, with the physical therapist, with the pharmacist, with somebody from the dental school,” Bashford said. “And then we’ll have — what I’ve taken to calling them — pods of caretakers working together inter-professionally.”
Julie Byerley, vice dean for education and chief education officer for the School of Medicine, said the decision to make Bashford the leader on this mission was a simple one.
“To choose to put him in the position was easy because he had so much passion and enthusiasm in recruiting a rural workforce and healthcare,” she said.
Byerley said the new office will be instrumental in advancing the goals espoused by the medical school.
“In developing positions for state service, one of our objectives is to reduce health disparities and people who live in rural areas suffer from health disparities that relate to the lack of access to care,” Byerley said. “One of the things we do to address that disparity is to produce more physicians to serve in those smaller communities.”
Around 50 percent of North Carolina counties are considered medically understaffed, Bashford said.
