Princeton, WV (WOAY) – WVU Medicine Princeton Community Hospital has been awarded a $750,000 federal grant to develop a new family medicine residency program designed to train physicians for rural and underserved communities.
The three-year grant comes from the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Federal Office of Rural Health Policy. It will fund the planning and development work needed to build an accredited program at the hospital, which serves a 10-county region across the two Virginias.
Hospital leaders say the grant’s focus on rural training is intentional, and it addresses a central reason rural areas have long struggled to recruit and keep primary care doctors.
“What they have found across the country is that most of the residency programs for primary care are in large metropolitan or urban areas. And so that’s the only exposure these students ever get … This way, if they come in for the residency program, they actually get to live here for three years, and during that three years, most people come to love it,” said Karen Bowling, president and CEO of WVU Medicine Princeton Community Hospital.
