Understanding and Overcoming Barriers to Rural Obstetric Training for Family Physicians

Family physicians are the most common health professional providing rural obstetric (OB) care, but the number of family physicians practicing OB is declining. To address rural/urban disparities in parental and child health, family medicine must provide robust OB training to prepare family physicians to care for parent-newborn dyads in rural communities. This mixed-methods study aimed to inform policy and practice solutions.

We surveyed 115 rural family medicine residency programs (program directors, coordinators, or faculty) and conducted semistructured interviews with personnel from 10 rural family medicine residencies. We calculated descriptive statistics and frequencies for survey responses. Two authors conducted a directed content analysis of qualitative survey and interview responses.

The survey yielded 59 responses (51.3%); responders and nonresponders were not significantly different by geography or program type. Most programs (85.5%) trained residents to provide comprehensive prenatal and postpartum care. Continuity clinic sites were predominantly rural across all years and OB training was largely rural in postgraduate year 2 (PGY2) and PGY3. Almost half of programs listed "competition with other OB providers" (49.1%) and "shortage of family medicine faculty providing OB care" (47.3%) as major challenges. Individual programs tended to report either few challenges or multiple challenges. In qualitative responses, common themes included the importance of faculty interest and skill, community and hospital support, volume, and relationships.

To improve rural OB training, our findings support prioritizing relationships between family medicine and other OB clinicians, sustaining family medicine OB faculty, and developing creative solutions to interrupt cascading and interrelated challenges.