OSU awarded $16 million to improve health outcomes in rural, tribal and underserved Oklahoma communities

TULSA, Okla. (KTUL) — Oklahoma State University awarded a $16 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to improve health outcomes in rural, tribal, and underserved urban areas.

According to HRSA, most counties in Oklahoma are designated as primary care health professional shortage areas. But OSU is working to change that.

The $16 million grant will be dispersed over four years.

Each year, $4 million will go towards supporting numerous educational programs, such as high school outreach programs, graduate certificate programs, clinical rotations, and more.

These programs aim to increase the number of primary care physicians practicing in rural, tribal, and underserved parts of our urban Oklahoma communities.

These communities have some great challenges when it comes to their health care.

For one, we know there's a lack of physicians in those areas.

Patients may have to travel a long distance to see a primary care physician, or a specialist or even pick up medicine at a pharmacy.

From a practical standpoint, instead of being able to take half of the day off work, folks in these communities have to take a whole day off work for travel, which then adds an extra burden.

This grant aims to help train physicians to be in the communities where they are critically needed and remove the barriers for those patients to get the care they need.

“This grant is going to help support us in recruiting students from those communities, supporting them in their educational process, so supporting them in the process of getting into medical school,” Natasha Bray, campus dean for OSU College of Osteopathic Medicine at the Cherokee Nation, said. “We're going to be able to train them with the knowledge and skills that they need while they're in medical school to go back to those communities. And it's really focused on how we make sure that people who are from those communities are trained to meet the future health care needs of their friends, their neighbors in their community.”

This grant was allocated to OSU to train Oklahoma’s future physicians to address Oklahoma’s healthcare disparities and improve the health of all Oklahomans.