Pennsylvania Secretary of Human Services Dr. Val Arkoosh said there is one physician for every 522 rural residents in Pennsylvania, compared to one for 222 in urban areas.
“The likelihood of a doctor choosing to practice in a rural community increases substantially when they have trained in a rural community during medical school or residency,” Arkoosh said.
Arkoosh joined community partners and elected officials to announce a clinical agreement between Clarks Summit State Hospital and Indiana University of Pennsylvania's new College of Osteopathic Medicine (IUPCOM) that aims to bolster the rural psychiatric workforce during a signing ceremony at the state hospital Tuesday afternoon.
Partnership between IUP, Clarks Summit State Hospital
Clarks Summit State Hospital will serve as a clinical training site for third- and fourth-year students at the College of Osteopathic Medicine. The partnership will contribute to the College of Osteopathic Medicine’s mission “to increase the number of community physicians in rural and underserved areas of Pennsylvania by providing innovative, evidence-based, and rural-community-centered education.”
“We're recruiting students from rural areas, we're training them at IUP for their first two years, and then we're placing them at our clinic rotation sites in rural areas … That really is the full continuum of medical education, hoping that they'll practice in a rural area down the road,” said Dr. Ryan Smith, IUPCOM’s associate dean of clinical affairs and graduate medical education.
The new college will open to students in fall 2027 and is currently accepting applications.
Clarks Summit State Hospital houses 203 adult inpatient psychiatric beds and is certified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. County mental health and behavioral agencies refer patients for admission. The hospital serves Bradford, Carbon, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, Wayne and Wyoming counties.
The hospital’s leadership celebrated the upcoming partnership.
“This partnership reflects a shared commitment to strengthen healthcare in our rural community and brings together two institutions with a common purpose: to educate the next generations of physicians while helping address the behavioral health needs of our community that we call home. We are honored to open our doors to the students,”
hospital CEO Kimberly Tenbus said.
Clarks Summit becomes the third state hospital partnership for the college, along with Torrance State Hospital and Warren State Hospital.
The state hospitals include a network of six psychiatric hospitals. Students will be required to complete two full months of psychiatric rotations between one of the three state hospitals and other psychiatric care partners, including community hospitals, critical access hospitals, federally qualified health centers and outpatient centers.
“This unique partnership … provides robust training in psychiatric care that will provide our future medical students with the baseline psychiatric knowledge that they need to practice medicine in any area … to be able to provide care to patients in these communities where they're needed the most,” Smith said.
Reinforcing rural health
IUPCOM considered the gaps in psychiatric care while developing clinical partnerships and school curriculum.
“We know that even in primary care visits, over 70% of the top five chief complaints that a patient has when following their diagnoses is related to behavioral health or mental health. We also know that for hospitalized patients, it's between 70 to 80 percent that the top three diagnoses that are being followed in an inpatient medical facility are behavioral health and psychiatric problems," said Dr. Miko Rose, the founding dean of IUPCOM.
Rose wants graduates to fulfill the school’s mission of practicing in rural and underserved parts of the state.
“It really is our hope that in creating this opportunity, we will be able to have students who come have inspiration through these early clinical experiences, and that they will return or stay within the region to provide services to the patients here,” Rose said.
State Rep. Bridget Kosierowski, D-Lackawanna County, who also is a nurse, welcomed IUPCOM’s future medical students to the region.
“I hope your students stay with us. I hope they stay here in Clarks Summit, here in Lackawanna County. We have a very aging population here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The more the merrier with the students,” Kosierowski said.
Osteopathic physicians take a patient-centered approach to health care, treating not only symptoms but the whole person, including how lifestyle and the environment impact a person’s health and well-being. The psychiatry rotation contributes to students’ osteopathic education.
“While psychiatry is one of the cornerstones of our mission, I realize that we're not going to coax 100% of our graduates into psychiatry, even though I would love that. But we are looking to produce well-rounded physicians that are able to practice basic mental health care in any field that they choose to practice in,” Smith said.
