ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Like many rural areas, Southwest Kansas has a need for medical professionals, and thanks to a partnership between some area hospitals, including Southwest Medical Center, and Southwestern College (SC) in Winfield, that need could be reduced in the future.
SC recently announced the development of a physician associate program, and as part of this, the college will train physician assistants.
As part of this training, students would do 10 clinical rotations across many major subspecialties, including family, women’s health, pediatrics and surgery.
“Our goal as a college is to have half of our physician assistant graduates serve in rural communities in the course of their career,” SC President Dr. Liz Frombgen said.
As Southwestern leaders looked at what this might be, Frombgen said they looked at the school’s historic recruiting territory in Southwest Kansas.
“We have many alumni who live out in your area, and it is near and dear to our heart as a college,” she said. “We want to be part of helping to ensure the success of rural communities in Kansas and Oklahoma, really everywhere, but particularly in Kansas both in this side of the state and your neck of the woods. We want to be part of the solution.”
Like Liberal, Winfield, with a population of about 12,000, is also a small community, and Frombgen said when Southwestern officials chose to put the PA program there as opposed to nearby metro Wichita, they wanted to have primary and family care with a rural focus.
“As we looked around for hospital partnerships, we have many of them, including at Southwest Medical Center,” she said. “We want them to spend time in various different settings to figure out who they are and where they want to be.”
Dr. Frombgen said she wants to see students in the program go to places with the highest need, and she feels SC officials have a natural affinity for Liberal.
“One of our employees actually lives in Liberal and is from Liberal, and I get to go out to Liberal and that part of the state a couple times a year to see our people,” she said. “Liberal holds a place in my heart as president.”
Frombgen said clinical rotations last about a month, and she anticipates each student in the PA program will live and spend time in the community where their clinicals take place. This, she said, will be done in communities far enough from SC to keep them from commuting from Winfield.
“Many of them will have apartments here in town,” she said. “Some of the rotations will be able to go every day and come back to their apartments here in town, but we’ve planned at least one of them to be out somewhere in Liberal, Garden City, Dodge City or Ulysses – somewhere where it’s too far for them to go home every day.”
Living in the communities where they would do clinicals, Frombgen said students would need to arrange for short-term housing in their respective towns.
“We can help them with this,” she said. “They would be staying in the community for that time period.”
The PA program is still in the accreditation process, which should be complete by January 2027, and Frombgen said she anticipates about 40 students in each year of the program.
“If each one of them ends up doing a rotation somewhere where they’re out in Southwest Kansas, that will be 40 students a year somewhere out there, not all of them in Liberal,” she said. “It depends on which rotation they’re going to do there, which rotation they do in Garden as to how it actually shakes out, but there’ll be a lot of students going out that way from Southwestern College.”
Frombgen said many of the students will get to come to Liberal and experience what life is like in Southwest Kansas.
“We’ll have a direct entry program for high school seniors, and we’re working with some of the high schools in your area to help us recruit students from Liberal, Dodge, Garden who know they want to go into health care to come to Southwestern College, get the undergraduate degree and the master’s degree in PA with the plan always to go home and support their communities,” she said.
Rural communities do not appeal to everyone, and Frombgen said helping people understand the appeal of rural life is somewhat challenging.
“We’re hoping to help solve the challenge as well by bringing to campus young people from Southwest Kansas who know they want to go home and serve their communities,” she said.
Frombgen said the partnership gives providers a great opportunity to recruit potential employees and medical providers.
“We’re really excited about it,” she said. “As a college, we can’t solve every problem around health care. What we can do is train amazing physician assistants and associates to go out and serve particularly in primary care. That’s where we’re going to focus. Our PAs can do any kind of PA work. It doesn’t have to be primary, but we know that’s the biggest need we see.”
Frombgen said the partnership is hugely beneficial to both SC and the rural hospitals where students will do their clinical work like SWMC.
“When you working like we are right now to launch a program like a PA program, one of the hardest thing to do is to get the required and necessary clinical sites,” she said. “We have all the ones we need. We’re going to keep working to have more so we have lots of options for our students. It’s really good for us as a college because we can’t do this work without having health system partners.”
Frombgen said SWMC will have the opportunity to train the next generation of advanced practice professionals and recruit some new providers to the area.
“It’s a great benefit for everybody,” she said.
Frombgen called the connection between Winfield and Southwest Kansas an awesome one.
“For us as a college, it is a connection to our historic relationship with that part of the state, and it’s also different than other partnerships,” she said. “Because we’re four hours apart, students will need to live there and be there and spend time there. They’re going to work a lot. That’s the nature of the rotation, but they will really get to be in the community. That’s a special thing.”
With Winfield also being a rural community, Frombgen said using Southwest Kansas to help students receive their clinical work makes for a total package for all involved in the process.
“To explain to people the value and what it’s like to be in a small community where you know people and you’ve got complex relationships and multi-faceted relationships with them, it’s hard to explain to people who don’t get to experience it, but it really is phenomenal,” she said.
Frombgen is excited for SC students to invest themselves as much as possible in rural communities.
“We’ll do that here in Winfield while they’re here so they’ll be prepared for what that could feel like,” she said. “For some of them, it will be an awesome fit. They’ll love it, and they’ll want to keep doing it.”
The impact for Southwestern will be huge, as Frombgen said the college will get to send its students to a place where they will be well cared for and trained.
“That’s really important,” she said. “As a college, we’re trusting the people who actually do the training and the clinical studies. We’re trusting them with our most precious thing, which is our students. This is what we do for a living. We educate people.”
Frombgen said the impact too could be huge for area hospitals.
“You could find providers who could be with you for their whole careers,” she said. “We have dedicated our skills lab to a nurse here in Winfield who had been a nurse for close to 50 years, and she helped deliver thousands and thousands of babies. Her impact as one human is huge in this community, and you could find your next PA in family practice who spends their career serving people in Southwest Kansas. How cool would that be?”
Pending approval for accreditation, Frombgen estimated the PA program would launch in January 2027, and the first group of students would go into clinical rotations in February 2028.
