Rural Residency Planning and Development Program Technical Assistance

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This notice solicits applications for the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Rural Residency Planning and Development (RRPD) Program Technical Assistance (TA) (RRPD-TA). The primary purpose of this cooperative agreement is the establishment of a rural residency planning and development TA center to support HRSA’s anticipated Rural Residency Planning and Development (RRPD) program, planned to start in FY 2019. The RRPD-TA awardee will identify and work with potential RRPD applicants to share resources and conduct preparatory work in anticipation of supporting the RRPD awardees. Contingent on the availability of resources, the secondary purpose of this cooperative agreement is to provide TA to other entities that a) would have been eligible for the RRPD program but did not apply, and b) were not selected for a RRPD program award. This cooperative agreement and the RRPD grant program are complementary and seek to expand the number of rural residency training programs and subsequently increase the number of physicians choosing to practice in rural areas. For the purpose of this cooperative agreement, rural residencies are allopathic and osteopathic physician residency training programs that primarily train in rural communities, place residents in rural locations for greater than 50 percent of their training, and focus on producing physicians who will practice in rural communities. A common model is for the first year of training to occur within a larger program in a more urban academic medical center and the final two years to occur in a rural facility. To secure institutional recognition and support, rural residency programs need both urban academic as well as rural community faculty champions. HRSA also recognizes that an accredited residency program with specialties such as family medicine, internal medicine, and psychiatry may not be available at a small rural hospital. To address this issue, the RRPD-TA awardee will work with RRPD program awardees to help them develop their plans to create new, accredited residency programs. The RRPD program will emphasize medical specialties in family medicine, internal medicine, and psychiatry to increase the number of new rural residencies that are financially and structurally sustainable beyond initial grant funding in order to support expansion of the rural physician workforce in areas of demonstrated need. Essentially, RRPD program funding would be distributed to eligible entities that are committed to building a strong medical workforce targeted to addressing underserved communities and health professional shortage areas. Examples of how RRPD award recipients will use their funding include building new residency programs or rural training tracks, recruiting residency program directors and faculty, achieving residency program accreditation, recruiting residents, commencing residency training, and developing graduate tracking systems.

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