Rural Healthcare

When she was a kid, Josie Syverson would stop by after school at the clinic where her mom worked as a transcriptionist. But it wasn’t until Syverson was in high school that she started to notice something. “I could see it was very evident that finding doctors for rural medicine was really difficult. The two doctors had been there for about twenty years at that point, delivered all the kids in Benson, both my husband and his siblings and myself were all delivered by the same family doctor in Benson,” Syverson recalls.

When she began to feel that medicine was her calling, she shadowed some of the healthcare workers to learn more. When applying to colleges, “the University of Minnesota Duluth sprang to mind out of an interest in the outdoors.” Both she and her husband enjoy fishing, hiking, and camping, and Duluth would allow them the chance to enjoy all of those things.

Syverson earned her undergraduate degree in biology in 2009 from UMD. She then attended the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth campus. In 2016, U.S. News and World Report ranked the University of Minnesota Medical School fifth in the country for rural medicine on its Best Medical Schools rankings. Syverson earned her medical degree in 2013. After completing her residency in family medicine at Idaho State, she returned to her hometown of Benson, Minnesota, population 3,078 (2019).

Meeting the demand for rural healthcare

Rural areas contain roughly 20% of the U.S. population, but only 9% of all U.S. physicians practice in rural locations. Syverson is the first to admit that it isn’t always easy to recruit doctors to come to rural areas. “The best opportunities we have is recruiting people to come back home. For myself, I knew that I wanted to be near family,” she says.

It matters to patients that they can receive care close to home. “Patients are so appreciative to stay close. They want to stay close for their clinic care. They want to stay close for when they need to be hospitalized or when their loved one needs to be hospitalized,” Syverson says.

“One of things that my patients really like about getting their care locally is easy communication. They don’t feel bad calling in to say ‘hey, I have this going on, do you think I need to be seen?’ And we have caught a lot of things that way. Sometimes it’s nothing, but sometimes we prevent hospitalizations. We catch an early infection. We can really be helpful that way.”

Training the next generation of rural physicians 

Syverson is grateful for her medical school education. “What I'm most thankful for, with the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth, is that they focus on rural healthcare from the very beginning, from day one of medical school. And they get real physicians involved, early on, so that students can see what happens in rural health care because not every student who goes to Duluth was raised in a rural area. So showing those students what it can be like and what opportunities are there, from the beginning. is extremely important,” she says.

“The programs that they have to get medical students out in rural areas has been vital in bringing those physicians then back to those same rural areas to practice. I’ve seen it on multiple occasions where a student isn’t even from that community but after having that experience of their internship in that rural community, they choose to go back there five years later when they’re done with their residency,” Syverson says.