Burcum: A pragmatic, heartfelt fix to Minnesota’s rural doctor shortage

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A before-the-ribbon-cutting preview of University of Minnesota’s new medical school campus in St. Cloud revealed an impressive state-of-the-art learning environment.

Natural light fills the anatomy lab, where a Cold Spring, Minn., native and award-winning professor now teaching in Great Britain will soon begin instructing students. Another classroom is a convincing replica of an emergency room, complete with Stryker-brand patient beds and oxygen hook-ups in the wall, where students will hone caregiving skills in a setting designed to give them familiarity with the real-world equivalent. Then there’s the brand-new student apartments with a connected walkway to classrooms, which will blunt winter weather.

A heartwarming though seemingly minor detail speaks volumes about the mission of this new branch of the medical school. Conference rooms and study nooks throughout the 60,000-square-foot repurposed CentraCare office building are named after the hometowns of the 24 students in the inaugural class.

Among them: Slayton. Willmar. Hutchinson. Milaca. Sauk Rapids. Foley. Rice. Maple Lake. Hollandale. Gaylord. Shafer. Even tiny Bowlus, a Morrison County town of 279, is represented.

It’s rural communities like these that especially stand to benefit from the doctors with regional roots who will graduate here, which is why the ribbon-cutting ceremony slated for 4-6 p.m. Sunday (and open to the public) is a Minnesota milestone.

A 2024 state Department of Health report underscores the challenges to ensuring that Minnesotans can get care close to home. Roughly 80% of the state’s 87 counties are already designated as primary care health professional shortage areas, with the shortage most severe in counties outside the metro.

Additional data from the state report adds to the urgency. Rural physicians are older than their urban counterparts, with a median age of 60 vs. 48. Now consider this finding: “Almost one in three rural physicians plan to leave the workforce within the next five years.”

If Minnesotans outside the metro are to access care in their communities in the not-too-distant future, game-changing ideas are urgent. The new medical campus is one of them. The U’s medical school and CentraCare, the St. Cloud-based health system serving 18 Minnesota counties, merit praise for teaming up to swiftly turn a good idea into reality.

In particular, the U’s medical school dean, Dr. Jakub Tolar, and CentraCare CEO Dr. Ken Holmen stand out for their leadership. They had vision and backed it up with hard work.

It was in January 2023 that plans for the new medical school campus were announced. This would be the first new U medical school branch since it opened its Duluth campus in 1972 to augment its Twin Cities academic health center. Mayo Clinic’s medical school also opened in 1972.

We need more doctors, especially with a growing and aging population. We need to ensure that as many as possible practice in areas where they are most needed. Graduating more doctors and putting a medical school in a rural region is a sensible step. The students attracted to a new venture like this are likely those who feel a calling to practice in an underserved area.

But the 2023 announcement contained what I worried might be wishful thinking: that the first students could start in St. Cloud as soon as 2025.

On Wednesday, however, I pulled up in front of a gleaming building that’s ready to go. Student orientation is Aug. 18.

Every student in the first class is from Minnesota, which bodes well for keeping graduates in the state. Dr. Jill Amsberry, a CentraCare pediatrician who also serves as a regional campus assistant dean, provided an interesting detail about that during the tour.

The central Minnesota location played a key role in getting students to apply, she said. They’d already started a life here or had ties to a family farm and didn’t want to move somewhere else for medical school. The U/CentraCare collaboration also kept the new campus’s costs affordable, minimizing reliance on public dollars.

CentraCare contributed the building and renovations to it at a total cost of $20 million, the health system said in a statement, with the state of Minnesota providing a grant of $5 million to partially offset the cost.

CentraCare also constructed the apartment complex connected to the Medical School to house students and their families for $20 million, officials said.

In addition, “Under the affiliation agreement, CentraCare will provide academic mission support to the University of Minnesota Medical School ... This is estimated at a total cost of $10M over the ramp-up period to a full complement of four enrolled classes. The State of Minnesota provided a $10M grant for the academic initiative (Medical School, Residency Programs, and Research) of which $4.5M will apply against the $10M ramp-up related costs.”