Native View: Minnesota’s rural doctor scarcity took me from Duluth to San Francisco – Duluth Information Tribune
“Hi, my name is Lora, I’m a first-year medical student, and I live in San Francisco.” This simple sentence, my brief introduction at the start of a meeting, reverberated in my mind. Hearing myself speak these words for the first time was jarring, the identities of “medical student” and “San Francisco resident” still feeling totally foreign to me.
My first several months of school have elicited a wide range of emotions. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to study medicine. I sometimes feel overwhelmed with the amount of information I am expected to learn. I also feel the enormity of the responsibility I am shouldering as a future physician.
I also feel an acute sense of displacement having moved across the country for the first time. I was born in Duluth, raised in the Northland, and attended college in rural Minnesota. This community instilled within me the values that guide my work and provided me with the spaces I needed to learn and grow.
And yet, like many young people, I have found an incredible sense of fulfillment and adventure in my cross-country move. San Francisco offers diverse cultural opportunities, the ability to study at an incredible institution, and, admittedly, much better weather than Duluth. For now, San Francisco is where I am living. But, when medical school ends, I will be faced with the question: Where should I call home?
It was my upbringing in the Northland that cemented my desire to pursue a medical career, particularly seeing how my family was impacted by provider shortages in our rural community. Just in October,
Essentia announced
it was ending urgent care at its Hermantown clinic, citing staffing challenges.
A 2022 Minnesota Department of Health survey found that there is a growing shortage of primary-care physicians in rural parts of the state. While metropolitan areas have an average of 20.3 pediatricians per 100,000 people, isolated rural communities have just 0.5. Physicians who practice in rural Minnesota are also on average 10 years older than their urban counterparts, and one in three rural physicians plans to retire within five years. This already urgent problem of rural-physician shortages will only compound in the coming years.
It is imperative we find new ways to recruit and retain doctors in rural Minnesota. We can call upon our elected officials to support legislation such as the bipartisan Rural America Health Corps Act, which aims to incentivize more health professionals to work long term in rural communities.
Returning to the question of where I should call home, on the one hand, the idea of coming back to the Northland to practice as a physician seems to be the culmination of all I have worked toward. It would be as much an expression of gratitude to the place that raised me as it would be a gift to reimmerse myself in this grounded, kind, and hard-working community. And yet, moving away from an urban environment means forgoing many of the compelling cultural, academic, and social opportunities that come with living in a city like San Francisco.
I’m not sure where my career will take me. I do know that no matter where I choose to live and work, I will continue to be an advocate for the health and well-being of our community, and I am certain that my fellow Northlanders will choose to do the same.
Lora Randa is a Duluth native studying to be a doctor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
