Boise State’s Ed Baker, professor and director of Center for Health Policy for the College of Health Sciences and David Schmitz, professor and chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of North Dakota, presented their most recent research on physician recruitment and retention to rural and underserved areas at a plenary session at the National Rural Health Association’s Critical Access Hospital Conference in Kansas City, Missouri.
Boise State’s Lisa MacKenzie, a senior research associate, and Jessica Marshall, a graduate research assistant, both from the Center for Health Policy, were co-investigators for this research. Conducted in rural hospitals in Iowa, this research investigated trustee/board members’ perceptions of factors important for physician recruitment and compared these perceptions to hospital executives and physicians from the same rural hospitals.
The findings suggested moderate to high consensus between these important groups of rural hospital leaders regarding factors associated with successful physician recruitment and retention but also found areas where trustee/board member education and training might be helpful. A subset of these findings recently was published in the Journal of Hospital Administration.