Throughout the United States, access to medical care is becoming a growing concern for a variety of reasons. In rural Southwest Georgia, the concern is already all too real.

One of the biggest challenges facing both the United States as a whole and Southwest Georgia is scarcity of physicians, something both Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital and Georgia Regents University’s Albany campus is working to combat.

Phoebe Putney, through it’s Southwest Georgia Family Medicine Residency program, trains incoming physicians and in doing so hopes to expand the overall network of physicians in the region.

According to Dr. George Fredrick, director of Phoebe’s Southwest Georgia Family Medicine Residency, one the main goals of the program, along with providing excellent training, is to expose resident doctors to rural Georgia in the hopes they will want to practice in a rural setting after graduation.

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