Across the country 35 million people live in places where they do not have adequate access to a family doctor. Health care experts call it a "crisis" that's only getting worse. To help fix the problem, the federal government advised medical schools to increase their enrollment by 30 percent, a strategy that's easier said than done as states slash budgets for public universities. Now, more and more medical schools are teaming up with hospitals to tackle the problem together.

In Terre Haute, Indiana, the Richard G. Lugar Center for Rural Health focuses on increasing health care access to people in rural areas by creating a rural medical training program for med students at Indiana University's School of Medicine's Terre Haute campus.

The Rural Health Center's Medical Director, Dr. James Turner, says Indiana currently needs roughly 2,000 family physicians to meet patient demand, but it takes essentially 11 years of schooling (undergrad, med school and medical residency) to become a practicing physician. "When a local mayor calls us and says do you have someone for us, you say, 'Mayor I'm sorry 11 years from now is the best we can do.' There's definitely a challenge to recruit and retain people in rural areas."

For med students in Terre Haute, the application process for the rural training program includes a 2 page written essay about why they want to practice rural medicine. Each applicant is also interviewed by a panel of people who are leaders from local communities, with no ties to medicine. "We bring in local mayors, farm bureau people, etc. It's really an opportunity to be interviewed and understand their (applicants) personality and wonder whether they want to practice in rural Indiana and if they have the right personality for that type of practice," says Dr. Turner.

He also points out, every primary care doctor hired in a small town has a direct impact on the town's economy. "Some studies show a rural health physician brings about 22 jobs into a community when they come ... and adds $1.5 million into the local economy and puts about $2 million into a local hospital each year." Dr. Turner estimates, the 21 medical students currently enrolled in the rural training program will probably bring about 500 jobs and 35 million dollars into rural Indiana, once they become family doctors. "This program brings highly educated people back into the rural community to help people grow for a long time."

The Rural Doctor Shortage by FOX News Crews, By FNC Reporter Peter Doocy

Today I’m at the Lugar Center for Rural Health in Terre Haute, Indiana, where they are training medical students who will eventually be dispatched to small towns across the country. There is a serious rural doctor shortage, so the work they do here is critical. Consider this: rural areas have 20% of America’s population – but only 10% of it’s physicians. It is dangerous to be far away from medical help, especially if you need emergency care, or if you are pregnant. Dr. James Turner, one of the doctors in charge here, told me that if there is nobody around to deliver your baby, and you are driving thirty or forty miles to a hospital, your pregnancy immediately becomes high risk. The facility here is state of the art- they have one life-like dummy that can breathe, bleed, vomit, and do everything else an actual sick person could do-and they have another dummy that can actually give birth! A fake baby is inserted into the stomach, and the high-tech ‘mother-to-be’ mannequin gives birth the same way a human does. They are also big on ‘tele-medicine’ here, and are teaching students how to use computer link-ups with rural clinics far away to diagnose patients over an internet connection. It’s a way of bringing big-city doctors to small towns, without the time and expense of actually having to go there. The computer at the patient’s end even has a stethoscope, so a doctor hundreds of miles away can listen to their heartbeat and breathing, and some doctors apparently prefer listening through the long-distance link-up, because the technology allows them to adjust the volume of the high-quality sound.

Transcript available online at: http://onthescene.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/02/12/the-rural-doctor-shortage/