Rural Residency Planning and Development Program

This notice announces the opportunity to apply for funding under the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Rural Residency Planning and Development (RRPD) Program. The purpose of this grant program is to improve health care in rural areas by supporting the development of new, accredited, and sustainable rural residency programs in family medicine, internal medicine, preventive medicine1, psychiatry, general surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology, to address the physician workforce shortages and challenges faced by rural communities. This program provides start-up funding to RRPD award recipients to create new rural residency programs that will ultimately be sustainable long-term through viable and stable funding mechanisms, such as, Medicare, Medicaid, and other public or private funding sources. For the purposes of this notice of funding opportunity, rural residencies are accredited allopathic and osteopathic physician residency programs that primarily train residents in rural training sites for greater than 50 percent of their total time in residency, and focus on producing physicians who will practice in rural communities. Rural residencies may be entirely rurally located or integrated within a larger, often urban residency program, also known as a rural training track (RTT). One common model is the 1-2 RTT format, where the first year of training occurs in an urban hospital or academic medical center, and the final two years in a rural health facility. This program aims to expand the number of physician training opportunities in rural settings and subsequently increase the number of physicians choosing to practice in rural areas. As such, RRPD funding will only support the development of new rural residency programs or RTTs and applications from existing programs will not be considered.