Kansas Legislature Passes Incentive Program for K-State Veterinary Students to Practice in Rural Areas

The Kansas Legislature and Governor Kathleen Sebelius blazed a new trail in support of the future of veterinary medicine this term with the passage and signing into law of House Bill 3005, “The Veterinary Training Program for Rural Kansas” at Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

The new law is intended to boost the number of students entering rural veterinary medicine. Up to five qualified students each year will receive essentially up to $20,000 a year for four years through forgiveness of student loans. Loans up to $20,000 will be forgiven for each year the student agrees to practice veterinary medicine in rural Kansas counties with 35,000 people or less.

Dr. Ralph Richardson, dean of K-State’s College of Veterinary Medicine says Kansas is the first state to allocate public funds to support a loan-forgiveness program of this type. Richardson, as well as other faculty and students, testified in support of the measure at legislative hearings along the way. He also has been contacted by Dr. Robert “Bud” Hertzog of the Missouri Veterinary Medical Assn., who was interested in seeking similar public fund allocations in Missouri to attract rural veterinary students.

Richardson’s colleague, David Andrus, Ph.D., professor and Payless ShoeSource Faculty Fellow at K-State’s College of Business, has conducted focus group research into the “rural lifestyle” that is scheduled to be published this month in the Journal of Veterinary Medical Education and the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. His research, Richardson says, underscores a very attractive picture of the rural lifestyle. “It is important to us that veterinary students see the community values they can serve by working in the rural areas. The lifestyle allows them to be closely involved with church, schools and the community,” Richardson noted.

The shortage of rural veterinarians has been exacerbated by the perceived lower salaries and the high student loan debt. The average K-State veterinary student leaves school with about $122,000 in educational debt, from both undergraduate and veterinary training.

If the rural veterinarian shortage continues unabated, it will seriously undermine the economic strength of the state, Richardson noted. “We would lose people from the rural areas because of the lack of economic base and lack of good schools,” he said.

The new Veterinary Training Program for Rural Kansas also will provide advanced training in public health and in the handling of emergencies/infectious diseases, including foot and mouth disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease), West Nile Virus, monkey pox, and more. “These students will be our ‘boots on the ground’ in protecting the community from potential public health concerns,” Richardson said. (The shortage of veterinarians trained to deal with food safety and animal disease control also is being addressed by a proposed federal initiative, the draft Veterinary Workforce Expansion Act.)

Richardson is upbeat about the new Veterinary Training Program for Rural Kansas, even with just five students admitted yearly.

“Everyone would love to have an immediate impact, but it takes time to provide specialty training. It will take six or seven years of getting veterinary students/new veterinarians into the pipeline and then maintaining that to see what kind of impact we will have.”

Behind the creation, introduction and passage of HB 3005 to create a new program to increase the number of veterinarians in rural Kansas, there was a little miracle. In fact, there were several little miracles.

In 2005, the House Agriculture Committee asked , Dr. Ralph Richardson, dean of Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, to speak to them, seeking a solution to a pressing problem: the shortage of veterinarians in rural areas.

A short time later, Dr. Richardson received a call from a Kansas Farm Bureau member, also the mother of a medical student at KU. “Why doesn’t veterinary medicine have something like the Bridges Program?” she inquired. The Bridges Program stimulates student interest in biomedical research by providing scholarships covering tuition, early research opportunities and strong mentoring by working professionals.

Dr. Richardson held a meeting with interested parties to discuss his ideas and what he had heard. Later, he met with people adept at the legislative process. Finally, he drafted a 1-1/2-page outline, which described the problem and contained the seeds of the eventual HB 3005. He sent his outline to George Teagarden, livestock commissioner, State of Kansas Animal Health Department.

The next day, Dr. Richardson got a call from Rep. Sharon Schwartz of rural Washington County. She didn’t know about his outline and meetings, but lamented how difficult it was to attract young veterinarians to rural communities. “What could be done?” she asked. Dr. Richardson told her about his outline and all the events that had transpired in just a few days. The Kansas House Republican from the 106th district soaked it all in and ran with it – becoming the sponsor of the legislation that would seek to attract rural veterinarians by forgiving educational loans in exchange for practicing in rural communities.

This was not the end of this measure’s good fortune. The first committee hearing for the draft legislation was held by Rep. Dan Johnson, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. Johnson’s own rural veterinarian in Hays, Kansas, was grappling with the shortage of rural veterinarians through difficulty in hiring an associate for his practice.

Richardson acknowledges that this legislation grew out of many serendipitous turns of events.